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Neighborhoods: Village of East Davenport has rich history

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By Mark Brown | Sunday, August 3, 2008 9:58 PM CDT | () comments

This bench along Jersey Ridge Road in Davenport's East Village, is one of five new benches added throughout the village in the hopes of giving the Village an identity and making it visually pleasing and more inviting. The Village of East Davenport has a rich history that goes back to the 1850s. (John Schultz/QUAD-CITY TIMES FILE PHOTO) Buy this Photo

History saturates almost every corner in the Village of East Davenport and surrounding residential areas.

The slight bend on the Mississippi River where the village is located was a natural resting place for Indian tribes and explorers who had braved the rugged rapids that once flowed downstream from present-day LeClaire, Iowa.

In those days, a desire to unlock the mysteries of the

Mississippi brought adventurers like Robert E. Lee, Zebulon Montgomery Pike and pioneer artist George Catlin to the banks of the calm eddy.

“Everyone who traveled the river had to stop at this point,” said Karen Anderson, a resident of the Bridge to Ridge neighborhood and an authority on local history. “You either portaged or ran the rapids.”

For Anderson, the Quad-Cities, and specifically the village, is a treasure chest packed full of footprints from the past. The area’s place in American history is often overlooked, she says, even by locals, despite being an entryway to the west after the Louisiana Purchase and the signing of a treaty in 1836 with Chief Keokuk of the Sac Tribe.

After the treaty opened up Iowa for settlement, a small town formed where the Village now stands. Davenport annexed the fledgling community in 1857, just six years after its official founding.

In the years that followed, the Civil War brought Camp McClellan to the open spaces surrounding the village and, in the post-war decades, large timber businesses erected mills to process masses of logs that were rafted down the river from the north.

“How can you forget that you were the first land-grant program west of the Mississippi?” Anderson said. “How could you forget Catlin and Lee and Pike? How could you forget it all and think that you are just some boring place that is a gas-stop somewhere between Chicago and Denver?”

The city desk can be contacted at

(563) 383-2450 or newsroom@qctimes.com.