The Iowa Legislature voted earlier this year to demolish the Wallace Building located northwest of the State Capitol in Des Moines. (Photo by Perry Beeman/ Iowa Capital Dispatch)
My family has called Davis County home for 185 years, all the way back to when William D. Evans and William Henson climbed down from their wagons in 1839 and 1840, a half-dozen years before Iowa became a state.
Evans es, Hensons and their neighbors were on the town square in Bloomfield in 1877 when the cornerstone was nudged into place in the new county courthouse. Construction of the grand stone building with its soaring clock tower was a testament by those pioneers that this part of rural America, and the new county seat town, needed a home for local government and a fitting gathering space for meetings, speeches, elections and other civic events…