Most of those who came after the land opened in 1833 were from Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, also from New York, Pennsylvania, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Most came as families and many considered Iowa a 'way-station' to the intended goal of land on the prairie or to the west.
The Norwegians arrived in 1840, Swedish in 1845, and Dutch in 1847. By the 1850s the largest group was the Germans with over 7,000, followed by the Irish with 4,885, England with 3,785, Canada with 1,756, the Netherlands with 1,108, 712 from Scotland, 361 from Norway, 231 from Sweden, and 19 from Denmark.
Others came to Iowa in the 1850s to start the colonies of Icaria and Amana where property was held in common. Icaria was a French colony settled near Corning, IA in 1858 as a purely socialist community. Amana was a religious colony formed by German pietists in 1855 and practiced communism until 1932.
Iowa openly recruited immigrants and formed a State Board of Immigration in 1870. Literature promoting the state, printed in English, German, Dutch, Swedish and Danish, was distributed. Immigration to Iowa continued throughout the remainder of the 19th century, peaking in 1890. In 1860, 106,081 of the 674,913 people living in Iowa were foreign-born.
Initial African-American settlement after the Civil War was in agricultural communities near the southern border, as well as in the river towns on the Mississippi and later in the coal mines.
Immigration from Italy and Croatia began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; they came to work in the coal mines. The early 20th century saw the start immigration from Mexico, and the mid-1970s immigration from Southeast Asia.
No comments:
Post a Comment