Ringgold Record
Mount Ayr, Ringgold County, Iowa
June 12, 1896

Benton, located on the Chicago Great Western Railroad, about midway between St. Joseph, Missouri, and Des Moines, Iowa, is a flourishing little town of 200 inhabitants, surrounded by as rich farming and grazaing lands as southern Iowa produces. It was first platted in the fall or summer of 1889 on a part of the Samuel IRWIN farm.

At present the following lines of business are represented: Hardware and furniture store, blacksmith shop, lumber yard, two stocks of general merchandise, millinery establishmen, hotel, livery and feed stable, restuarant, barber shop, creamery and butcher shop.

For a small place we are proud of our record for churches. In the summer of 1890 the Methodists built themselves a good room house of worship, followed in 1894 by the Adventists, who built a neat and substantial building to shelter their flock. In 1895 the United Brethren moved their Siloam church from Washington township to our town. The members of the Christian church also hold their services in the United Brethren church until they can build. Three churches and no saloons or drug store speaks well for our town.

We have a splendid two-room schoolhouse just completed which is an ornament to our town. The I.O.O.F. Lodge of this place is erecting a hall 22x46 feet, two-story and cellar, the upper room to be occupied by the order and the lower by some business firm.

Benton lies on a gentle southeast slope and is as pretty a site for a city as there is on the C.G.W.R.R. It has an abundance of water, three wells having been made which have a distance respectively of 95 feet, 106 feet, and 110 feet to water which stands 25 deep and cannot be dipped or pumped dry.

The writer of these lines well remembers hunting wild turkeys and deer on the present site of our town then, in 1865, covered with scrub oak and hazel brush, but "since that time how things have changed."

You could count all the business houses in Mt. Ayr on your fingers and they had the trade of nearly the whole county, all their goods having to be brought from Eddyville by wagons.

The old-fashioned stage coach was all the mode of travel and it ran from Eddyville to Nebraska City.

The writer well recollects his experience in a "jerky", as those stage coaches were called. In coming through Decatur county the driver seemed to delight in driving fast over the hills and hollows and the four persons inside of the "jerky" would accommodate were often pitched into each other's arms as they sat facing one another and the "jerky" would pitch down into a deep ravine and up again, suddenly stirring the passengers up in good shape while the driver laughed in his sleeve.

Transcription by Sharon R. Becker, May of 2010