Half of Iowa's Army Trained Here

The neighborhood east of here was once one of the Union Army's busiest training grounds. Camp McClellan was established in Davenport in August eighteen sixty-one, just months after the Civil War broke out. Over the next four years, roughly forty thousand Iowa soldiers passed through, training here before heading south.

That was nearly half of all the Iowa men who fought in the war. In eighteen sixty-three, a portion of the camp was converted into a prison for Dakota tribal members captured after the U.S.

-Dakota War in Minnesota. After the war, the land gradually became a residential neighborhood, today's McClellan Heights, with Lindsay Park preserving a corner of the original grounds.