This week in Newton
Nothing on Newton’s calendar for the next two weeks yet.
About Newton
Newton was laid out in 1846 as Newton City, picked as the seat of the brand-new Jasper County and named, like the county, for a Revolutionary War soldier; the name was trimmed to plain Newton a year later. Coal mines fed its early growth, but the town's real engine arrived in 1893, when Frederick Maytag and three partners pooled $2,400 to build farm machinery, a venture that became the Maytag washing machine company and made Newton a factory town known coast to coast. In 1911 the county finished its Indiana limestone courthouse, whose 140-foot clock tower still rises over the downtown square and gets dressed up every Christmas season. The Maytag family also gave the town a 40-acre park with a pool and the Maytag Bowl bandshell, where free summer concerts still play, and in 1941 the family's dairy farm made its first wheels of Maytag Blue Cheese. When the Maytag plant closed in 2007, Newton went to work: wind-blade and tower makers moved in, the old Maytag campus became Legacy Plaza and a DMACC campus, and today families come for downtown murals and sculptures, the Valle Drive-In, and race weekends at Iowa Speedway.