Stuart, IA

Stuart started as Summit Grove, a small Quaker settlement where Indiana and Ohio arrivals gathered around 1850. The railroad changed the plot. Captain Charles Stuart bought land in 1868, helped bring the Rock Island line through, and pushed for Stuart to become a division station with repair shops. The town’s plat was filed in 1870, and brick commercial buildings began replacing the early wood structures after an 1873 fire. The railroad shops are gone, but the city still sits along the old route and just off Interstate 80, with a downtown shaped by that first transportation bet. Stuart is a good Iowa example of a town built because someone convinced the railroad to stop there.