Janesville, IA

Janesville sits right on the Cedar River, straddling Black Hawk and Bremer counties and keeping a foot in both maps. John T. Barrick founded it in 1849 after coming up from Cedar Falls, named the place for his wife, Jane, and watched it become the first town platted in Bremer County. The river has never been scenery only: the Barrick Road Bridge collapsed into it in 1992, and floods in 2008 and 2016 pushed water into town. Janesville's library began in 1962 in a room at City Hall, while the consolidated school carries the town through the present. It is a small Iowa river town with a long memory for bridges, floods, and firsts.