Winfield, IA

Winfield is a Henry County city laid out in 1852, in the farm country north of Iowa Highway 78. Its biggest early change came with the Burlington and Northwestern Railway, which reached town in late 1876 and connected Winfield with Burlington. The line extended toward Washington by 1880, while the Burlington and Western Railway was built from Winfield toward Oskaloosa in the early 1880s. The Iowa Central also crossed the Burlington and Northwestern at Winfield, giving the small city an unusual concentration of narrow-gauge rail lines.

ATTRPopePompus / CC BY-SA 4.0

The tracks no longer carry the same daily traffic, but they mark the town’s location and early growth. The East Fork of Crooked Creek runs just east of the city, and the surrounding roads still lead through Henry County fields toward Burlington, Washington, and Oskaloosa. Winfield-Mt. Union Community School District keeps school life centered in town, with the local program classified as a 1A school. The 2020 census counted 1,033 residents. Winfield is an Iowa place where a creek, a school district, and a complicated railroad past still fit together on the same small map.