This week in Urbandale
About Urbandale
Urbandale got its start when a few farm families northwest of Des Moines pooled about $2,000 for a two-room schoolhouse, then incorporated in April 1917 so their children could have a school district of their own; brothers Millard and Clarence Olmsted helped lead the way. For its first decades it was a streetcar town at the end of the Urbandale Line, with trolleys carrying coal miners and students until 1951, and many of today's DART bus routes still trace those old tracks. After World War II the town took off, climbing from fewer than 1,800 people in 1950 to more than 14,000 by 1970, and it keeps growing west into Dallas County. Families know it best for Living History Farms, 500 acres where you can walk from a 1700 Ioway farm to an 1850 pioneer cabin, a 1900 horse-powered farm and the little 1870s town of Walnut Hill; Pope John Paul II drew a crowd of hundreds of thousands there in 1979. Closer to the old center, the Olmsted family's 1904 foursquare farmhouse, saved by the Urbandale Historical Society, opens its doors for tours and a Christmas open house, and 850 acres of parks and 54 miles of trails tie the neighborhoods together.