This week in Muscatine
About Muscatine
Muscatine got its start in 1833 as a riverside trading post set up by agents of Colonel George Davenport, and it was incorporated six years later under the name Bloomington before a mail mix-up with other Bloomingtons pushed it to take a name of its own. Before the Civil War it was home to Iowa's largest Black community, and barber-turned-businessman Alexander Clark sued the local school board in 1868 so his daughter Susan could attend her neighborhood school, a case that opened Iowa's public schools to every child. A young Mark Twain spent the summer of 1855 working at the Muscatine Journal and later wrote that he never saw sunsets to match the ones painted across this bend of the Mississippi. In 1884 a German immigrant named J. F. Boepple began punching buttons from river mussel shells, and the factories that followed made Muscatine the Pearl Button Capital of the World. Today families stroll the riverfront under the Norbert F. Beckey Bridge, wander the free Muscatine Art Center in the 1908 Musser Mansion, and still claim the title of Watermelon Capital of the World.