This week in North Liberty
About North Liberty
Settlers John Gaylor and Alonzo Dennison came to this stretch of Johnson County in 1838, and for years the place went by homespun names like Big Bottom, North Bend and even Squash Bend, after the nearby curve of the Iowa River, until it was platted as North Liberty in 1857. For a long time it stayed a small farm town: H.A. White's general store, raised in 1876, was its only business for over a decade and doubled as the post office. When the town incorporated in 1913 it counted about 190 people, and the Queen Anne farmhouse Samuel and Emma Ranshaw built in 1908 still stands, now a gathering spot just north of the Community Center. Growth arrived in the 1960s and never really stopped, bringing a library and Penn Meadows Park in the 1980s, Liberty High School in 2017, and more than 20,000 neighbors by 2020. Today families fish the stocked pond at Liberty Centre, fill the ballfields at Penn Meadows, and spread out lawn chairs for shows at the Hy-Vee Amphitheater in Centennial Park, right in the middle of the corridor between Iowa City and Cedar Rapids.