The Dodge House: Where Lincoln Asked the Railroad Question

The house on Third Street in Council Bluffs was built in eighteen sixty-nine by a man who had just finished building a railroad across a continent. Grenville Mellen Dodge was a Civil War general, a surveyor, and the chief engineer of the Union Pacific Railroad. The Victorian mansion he erected here, designed by Chicago architect William Boyington and costing thirty-five thousand dollars, was positioned deliberately near mile one of the Transcontinental Railroad. Dodge wanted to live at the starting line of what he had built.

The relationship between Dodge and the railroad had a specific origin that began not with the Union Pacific but with Abraham Lincoln. In the summer of eighteen fifty-nine, Lincoln came to Council Bluffs. He was not yet president. That was still eighteen months away. But he was already thinking about a transcontinental railroad, which Congress had debated for years without settling on a route. By Dodge's own later account, Lincoln sought him out at a hotel in town because he knew Dodge had surveyed the territory west of the Missouri River more thoroughly than almost anyone alive.

The two men talked about the best route to the Pacific. Dodge recommended the Platte Valley, following the natural corridor west through Nebraska. Lincoln, in Dodge's telling, took his word for it. After Lincoln signed the Pacific Railroad Act in eighteen sixty-two, an executive order in March of eighteen sixty-four fixed the starting point of the line at Council Bluffs, and the Platte Valley route was the one the railroad followed.

Dodge spent the years between that conversation and this house fighting a war, surveying the route under fire from Lakota and Cheyenne raiding parties, and driving the Union Pacific to its meeting with the Central Pacific at Promontory Summit in Utah on May tenth, eighteen sixty-nine.

The house he came home to is one of two National Historic Landmarks in Council Bluffs, still furnished largely as he left it.