This week in Clinton
About Clinton
Clinton grew out of two river towns: Lyons, started by Elijah Buell in 1837, and a riverbank plat first called New York that took Governor DeWitt Clinton's name in the 1850s, when the railroad picked the spot for a Mississippi crossing. That rail bridge, finished in 1860 as only the second ever to span the river, made the town a hub, and the sawmills lining the bank turned Clinton and Lyons into the self-styled Lumber Capital of the World until the northern forests gave out around 1900. The two towns joined in 1895, and the lumber money left behind Victorian mansions, a red-sandstone courthouse with a green copper tower, and the Van Allen Building, a Louis Sullivan department store dressed in bursts of green terra cotta. Families today climb to the stone castle at Eagle Point Park for the view over the river, catch a summer musical aboard a 1936 paddlewheel boat on the levee, and hear the lumber story at the Sawmill Museum. With the Gateway Bridge reaching to Illinois and a riverfront honored among Iowa's first Great Places, Clinton still lives facing the water.