Millville: Iowa's Smallest City Gives Up

Millville in Clayton County holds a distinction both modest and melancholy: it was one of Iowa's smallest incorporated cities before deciding, in two thousand fourteen, that incorporation was no longer worth it. The community of twenty-nine residents formally disincorporated in July two thousand fourteen, handing all government functions back to Clayton County, unable to find enough residents willing to serve as city officers and unwilling to navigate the growing complexity of small-municipality regulations. The village had its origins in eighteen thirty-two, when Joseph Quigley and companions built a log cabin and sawmill on the Turkey River, making it one of the first settlements north of Dubuque in the county.

It incorporated as a city in nineteen sixty-seven. Millville was the fifth Iowa city to disincorporate since nineteen ninety-two, part of a quiet trend as rural depopulation makes small-town self-governance unsustainable.