One Hundred Fifty Children by Steamboat

The Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home has stood on this hillside above Davenport since eighteen sixty-five. When the Civil War ended, more than thirteen thousand Iowa children had lost their fathers to the fighting. On November eleventh, eighteen sixty-five, the home received its first residents: one hundred fifty children arrived by steamboat on the Mississippi River and were placed in the care of matron Annie Wittenmyer.

Wittenmyer had spent the war organizing hospital diet kitchens for the Union Army and was already a celebrated figure in Iowa. She ran the home until eighteen sixty-seven. The institution eventually opened its doors to all of Iowa's orphaned children, drawing from all ninety-nine counties in the state.

In nineteen forty-nine, the Iowa General Assembly renamed it the Annie Wittenmyer Home in her honor. Today the campus is listed on both the Davenport Register of Historic Properties and the National Register of Historic Places.