This week in Coralville
About Coralville
Coralville is named for something very old: the fossil corals pressed into the limestone along the Iowa River. A Harvard scientist lectured about those corals in 1864, and when more were uncovered while a new mill went up in 1866, the little mill town took the name. People lived on this riverbank far earlier still, and the Edgewater Park Site here holds the oldest evidence in Iowa of crops being grown, about 3,800 years ago. In 1856 some 1,300 Mormon pioneers camped here and built handcarts from local timber for the long walk west, a stop remembered today at the Mormon Handcart Park. The town stayed small until after World War II, when university families settled in and the Coralville Dam (1958) and Interstate 80 changed the map. Today the 1876 brick schoolhouse on Fifth Street is a museum at the edge of Old Town, and more than 22,000 neighbors share the library, the river trails, Coralville Lake and the Iowa Children's Museum.