Sabula: Iowa's Only Island City

Sabula was settled in eighteen thirty-five on a narrow peninsula jutting into the Mississippi, its sandy soil giving it the Latin name for sand, sabulum, softened by an early resident to Sabula for elegance. For over a century it sat attached to the Iowa mainland.

Then in nineteen thirty-nine, Lock and Dam Number Thirteen was completed downstream, and the rising water permanently flooded the bottomlands to the west of town. The Mississippi flanked Sabula to the east. The flooding cut it off to the west. An island was born entirely by accident. A levee followed in nineteen fifty-seven for protection. Today Sabula has a population of around five hundred people and remains the only city in Iowa situated entirely on an island. It is a genuine geographic oddity: a Midwestern river town that didn't become what it is by choice.