This week in Ottumwa
About Ottumwa
Ottumwa takes its name from a Meskwaki word for the tumbling waters of the Appanoose Rapids, and the town was staked out beside them in May 1843, on ground where the camps of Chiefs Wapello and Appanoose had stood. A year later it became the county seat, and when the railroad reached the Des Moines River in 1859, coal mines, John Deere's farm-equipment works and John Morrell's packing plant turned it into a working city on both banks. Coal mattered so much that from 1890 to 1892 the town raised a turreted Coal Palace faced in the stuff, and President Benjamin Harrison came to see it. Around Central Park, the sandstone courthouse with Chief Wapello's statue over the door, the domed Carnegie library and St. Mary's corner bell tower still keep each other company, and downtown folks line up at the horseshoe counter of Canteen Lunch in the Alley for a loose-meat sandwich and a slice of pie, as they have since 1927. Today the Jefferson Street Viaduct still carries traffic across the river, the California Zephyr stops at the old Burlington depot every day, and Ottumwa still wears the 'Video Game Capital of the World' title it claimed in 1982.