This week in Le Mars
About Le Mars
Le Mars started in 1866 as one homesteader's claim on the Floyd River, and it truly took off once the railroad arrived from Sioux City in 1870. The name itself is a little puzzle: on an early train excursion, a group of women built it from the first letters of their own names. In the 1880s hundreds of young Englishmen came to learn farming here, bringing polo, golf and pubs to the prairie, and the Carpenter Gothic St. George's Episcopal Church still stands from that era. Ice cream gave the town its lasting identity after the Wells family began making it in 1925 and a 1935 naming contest produced Blue Bunny, which is why Le Mars calls itself the Ice Cream Capital of the World. Today about 10,500 people call this Plymouth County seat home, with its columned courthouse, a round barn saved at the fairgrounds, the downtown ice cream parlor and Ice Cream Days every June.