Osceola: Named for a Seminole Chief

Clarke County's first permanent settlers arrived in eighteen forty-six, a Mormon party that, by local tradition, separated from its wagon train and stayed to farm. In eighteen fifty-one the county chose a town site for its seat, and a settler, moved by the treatment of the Seminole nation, proposed naming the new town Osceola in honor of the Seminole leader who had resisted United States removal until his capture and death in eighteen thirty-eight. The name held. Osceola remains the seat of Clarke County, a small city on Interstate Thirty-Five in south-central Iowa.