Grinnell, Iowa: The Prairie Radical

The town you are passing through carries the name of a man who was told, in so many words, to go west and cause trouble.

Josiah Bushnell Grinnell was a Congregationalist minister from Vermont who had attended the Oneida Institute in New York, a radical school that opposed slavery at a time when doing so could end a career or a life. When he settled in Washington, D.C. and preached an antislavery sermon in eighteen fifty-one, the community made clear he was not welcome. It was the New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley who reportedly advised him, in what became one of the most famous editorial lines of the era, to go west, young man. Grinnell took the advice literally.

He came to Iowa, staked out land on the prairie in eighteen fifty-four, and platted a town he named for himself. His home became a stop on the Underground Railroad. He helped found Iowa College, originally established by New England Congregationalists in Davenport in eighteen forty-six as an early four-year college west of the Mississippi River, and donated land to bring it here in eighteen fifty-nine. When the college officially renamed itself Grinnell College decades later, it memorialized both the man and the mission.

Grinnell served as a congressman during and after the Civil War, representing a district he had helped turn Republican. But his most lasting legacy was planting a serious liberal arts institution in the middle of a cornfield. The college today has an endowment in the billions, routinely appears on lists of the most selective schools in the country, and practices a no-loan financial aid policy that would have delighted a man who spent his life arguing that education was not a privilege but a right.

The town itself remains modest. About nine thousand people. A few dozen antique Victorians. US Route Six runs along the south edge of campus, roughly the same path Josiah Grinnell rode in on a borrowed horse, convinced that the prairie needed saving.