3 eastern Iowa towns carry patriotic name of Liberty

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By Bill Wundram | Friday, July 04, 2008 |

Flags will wave, red-white-and-blue bunting will hang from porches, and a few kids will blast off firecrackers today in the name of liberty and Independence Day in three eastern Iowa towns — all of them carrying the name of Liberty.

Few stand at attention to realize on this Fourth of July that there are three “Liberties” within the Quad-City region — New Liberty, West Liberty and North Liberty.

There is no other such pocket of patriotism in all of Iowa. There is an Independence, Iowa, but it stands alone.

There is a reason for the Liberties, the devotion of immigrants to the new land and its freedom from European aggravation and persecution. West Liberty has a big, brass-like Statue of Liberty outside its municipal building with a plaque on the side from the Boy Scouts that says, “With faith and courage of their forefathers who made possible the freedom of the United States.” New Liberty, also, has a Statue of Liberty at the entrance to the hamlet.

Midwest place names give intriguing glimpses of the hopes of settlers. Some had early names like Flea Hill or Cut Nose Village. One town name was decided in a poker game.

But there is no question why the three Iowa towns carry the name Liberty”

The name liberty, or its derivation, offered a cheer of hope to immigrants. Germans flocked to the Davenport region in the 1840s and 1850s. In Germany, they faced being drafted into the armies, prison or worse if they did not go along with the ruling crowd. In Scott County, they shouted “freiheit,” which is Deutsch for liberty. No wonder that German farmers, working the black soil of northwest Scott County, named their township Liberty. Then came the hamlet Liberty, and later New Liberty when the small, frame post office was moved.

Liberty Pattern Co. in New Liberty has a Statue of Liberty outside its plant where the petunias are red, white and blue. Flags fly today from every post along Highway 130 in this tiny town of 130 people that just seems to show up from nowhere on the prairie.

“Liberty was what German immigrants were seeking when they found their way to Scott County in the 1860s. We’re proud of that Liberty name,” says Marion Spengler, New Liberty town historian. “In the early 1900s, if one didn’t speak German, they had trouble doing business in New Liberty.”

The patriotic zeal of West Liberty may come from a handful of its earliest settlers, who carried the banner of liberty from Liberty, Ohio, a place dating back to the early 1800s when ink on the Declaration of Independence was barely dry.

West Liberty carries its patriotism on banners hanging from light posts. Bigger than the word “welcome” is an imprint of the cracked Liberty Bell. Flags line the streets, with the biggest Old Glory flying alongside that Statue of Liberty at the municipal building and police station. The Ohio settlers named the area for their hometown of Liberty in 1838, but West Liberty wasn’t incorporated until 1868, a patriotic time that carried “liberty” as a legacy in the post-Civil War northern wave of patriotism.

It’s no wonder that North Liberty carries that name. One of its first names was Squash Bottom, but that didn’t appeal to the more enterprising settlers. Some of them were immigrant Austrians and Czechs who drifted down from Cedar Rapids. They had been under the thumb of the Habsburgs, who held a tight rein on their native lands and did not allow land ownership except to the privileged.

The Czechs and their Austrian counterparts, seeking a new freedom in America, believed that “Liberty” — and later North Liberty — was a far more proper and patriotic name than Squash Bottom.

Independence, Iowa, which is far from the Quad-City region, has a logical name for its existence. It was founded just a few weeks after the Fourth of July in 1847.

Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com.