This week in Bettendorf
About Bettendorf
Bettendorf began as two small German farm villages, Lilienthal and Gilbert, on the Iowa bank of the Mississippi. Around 1900 the town of Gilbert gave William and Joseph Bettendorf 70 acres of riverfront if they would move their iron wagon works there, and in 1903 its 440 residents incorporated and took the brothers' name. Alcoa's huge aluminum mill in neighboring Riverdale brought thousands of jobs starting in the late 1940s, and in 1991 the country's first modern riverboat casinos launched from Bettendorf's waterfront. Today the twin basket-handle arches of the I-74 bridge, opened in 2020 and 2021, carry traffic to Moline, with a walking and bike path that opened in 2022. Families know the city-run Family Museum, built in 1997 for children eight and under, which sits on a learning campus beside the public library. It is a town of about 39,000 where kids, rivers and bridges meet.