Ottumwa: Coal, Pork, and the Home of Radar O'Reilly

Ottumwa stands on the Des Moines River in Wapello County, at a site where the Meskwaki people had established camps named for their chiefs Wapello and Appanoose. Settlement began in eighteen forty-three during the land rush that followed the opening of southern Iowa to homesteading. The town went through several names, including Appanoose Rapids and Louisville, before landing on Ottumwa, a word believed to derive from a Meskwaki or related Algonquian phrase meaning swift water or place of swift waters, an apt description of the Des Moines River above the original mill site.

For a century, Ottumwa ran on two industries: coal and pork. Northeastern Wapello County sat atop large coal seams, and by the eighteen sixties, mines were operating throughout the area. By eighteen seventy-two, one operation alone employed three hundred men and produced seventy-seven thousand tons per year. By eighteen eighty-nine, fifteen mine shafts were at work in Ottumwa. The city was so proud of its coal economy that between eighteen ninety and eighteen ninety-two it built an exhibition building called the Coal Palace, a Byzantine and Gothic structure with a central tower two hundred feet high, designed to showcase the region's black-diamond wealth to investors and visitors.

The meatpacking industry arrived in eighteen seventy-seven, when John Morrell and Company established a plant here to capitalize on railroad connections and a ready supply of Iowa hogs. The Morrell plant operated in Ottumwa for nearly a century, until nineteen seventy-three, employing thousands of workers and anchoring the city's economy through the Depression, the World Wars, and the postwar boom.

Ottumwa is also claimed as the hometown of Corporal Walter Eugene O'Reilly, better known as Radar, from the television series M-A-S-H. The character was inspired by Don Shaffer, a real soldier from Ottumwa who served in Korea. The show's creators latched onto the town's name as an unlikely, Midwestern-ordinary foil to the chaos of a Korean War field hospital, and Radar's homesickness for Ottumwa became one of the warmest running jokes of the eleven-year series.

The comedian and actor Tom Arnold was actually born in Ottumwa in nineteen fifty-nine, giving the city two claims on American pop culture. The coal is gone. The Morrell plant has closed. But the Des Moines River still runs swift through the middle of the city, as it always has.