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.
Evanses, 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.
Voters demonstrated their faith in their local leaders when they authorized the building’s construction. The price tag came to about $60,000—the equivalent of about $2 million in today’s money.
Davis County courthouse, photographed around 1900…