Don't forget Centerville, Iowa. Touts itself as "The World's Largest City Square" (outside of Red Square, in Moscow, of course) AND....the birthplace of Chicago Lou and Hy Vee food stores!
"Centerville is a city in and the county seat of Appanoose County, Iowa, United States. [3] The population was 5,528 in the 2010 census, a decline from 5,924 in the 2000 census.[4][5] After the turn of the 20th century Centerville had a booming coal mining industry that attracted many European immigrants. The city today remains the home of many Swedish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Croatian-Americans, Albanian-Americans and others descended from immigrants who worked in the mines.

Founded in 1846 by Jonathon Stratton under the name of "Chaldea," the city was planned around a unique two-block long city square. The name was later changed to Senterville, named after William Tandy Senter, a prominent Tennessee politician. When incorporation papers were filed in 1855, someone mistook the name for a misspelling and corrected it to Centerville.[6]

[edit] A mining town

Map of the Centerville area from 1908, showing the railroads and shipping coal mines (shown in red) of the region. Centerville is in the lower right quadrant. Smaller mines that did not ship by rail are not shown.

The first coal mine in Centerville was opened in 1868, with its mine shaft about one-half mile from the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad depot. Horse-power was used to raise coal from the mines until 1872, when the Watson Coal Company opened a mine equipped with a steam hoist. The Centerville Block Coal Company, organized in 1894, consolidated the operation of numerous mines in the region to become the dominant mining company. In 1914, Centerville Block Coal produced over 100,000 tons of coal, ranking among the top 24 coal producers in the state. Centerville Block's largest competitor, formed around the same time, was the Scandinavian Coal Company, organized by a group of Swedish immigrants.[7][8] By 1938, coal production in the Centerville region was 600,000 tons per year.[9] The mines were in the Mystic coal bed, 125 feet below ground in Centerville but exposed at the surface in Mystic, 5 miles to the northwest.[10]

The upper works of the Relay Mine No. 3, circa 1908.

Centerville Block Coal's Relay Mine Number 3 was located on the west side of town (Number 31 on the map). By 1908, the coal face was a mile from the base of the shaft. Mules were used to haul trains of loaded coal tubs to the main haulage way, where they were hauled by a continuous loop of cable the last half mile to the shaft. The coal seam here was about 3 feet thick, and the shaft was 107 feet deep. A centrifugal blower 12 feet in diameter provided ventilation, and compressed air was used to power mining machinery.[11][12]

Local Assembly 1020 of the Knights of Labor was based in Centerville and had a membership of 150 in 1884.[13] On April 1, 1885, 325 miners in town went on strike, protesting a 20% drop in wages reflecting a decrease in the demand for coal during the summer months.[14] Later, the United Mine Workers of America had a very strong presence in Centerville. In 1912, UMWA Local 553 in Centerville had 1194 members, making it the second largest UMWA local in the country.[15] The largest UMWA local was in Buxton, Iowa.

In 1910, the Scandinavian Coal Company drilled a 550 foot exploratory hole in Centerville, discovering a deposit of gypsum and anhydrite 10 feet thick near the bottom. The Centerville Gypsum Company was formed to exploit this deposit, and between 1912 and 1913, the company bored a shaft down to the gypsum. Water problems delayed the opening of the mine until 1917, and commercial production began in 1919.[16] The mine was closed in the early 1930s.[17]

The Sunshine mine, about 3 miles west of Centerville (number 30 on the map), was very small in 1908, with just a horse-powered hoist at the pit head.[12] By the 1930s, this was a large mine with an attached mining camp and a mountain of mine waste 500 feet long.[18] The Sunshine Mine Drive-In is a theater on the former mine site that opened in 2005.[19]

[edit] The post-coal era

Centerville experienced its peak population in the early 1900s as the popularity of coal peaked. After that point, as usage dwindled, the coal industry that had been the community's life blood collapsed. In the 1950s and 1960s a civic movement to promote new industries began. This effort culminated in the building of Rathbun Dam, near the city of Rathbun, Iowa, forming Rathbun Lake, known as "Iowa's Ocean", that was dedicated on July 31, 1971 by President Richard M. Nixon.

Today the city is supported by several small industrial plants, mostly in the area of plastic products. In June 2006 the Centerville Daily Iowegian reported that the city's largest employer, a Rubbermaid plant, that opened in Centerville in 1985, would shut down in September 2006 displacing 500 workers. In 2007, the former Rubbermaid building was purchased by Lee Container Corp. of Homerville, Georgia, and is planned to be re-opened in 2008. Lee Container is a manufacturer of H.D.P.E. blow molded containers for crop protection-, lubricant-, pet care-, beverage-, specialty- and household products. The city (and county) is also served by several other manufacturing operations, including Curwood, a Bemis Company, a major supplier of flexible packaging and pressure sensitive materials used by leading food, consumer products, manufacturing, and other companies worldwide. The Barker Company, of Keosauqua, Iowa that manufactures many lines of refrigerated, non-refrigerated and hot display cases for the supermarket, convenience store and food service industries located a manufacturing plant in Centerville in 1998. However, despite these businesses, unemployment rates in the area remain at higher than average levels in the state.

As county seat, Centerville had a thriving retail sector, serving people from smaller communities and farms in the area as well as local residents. Many shops were located around the Courthouse Square Historic District, which has hundreds of parking spaces between the shops' sidewalks and the courthouse lawn—in effect, six-lane wide streeting around the Appanoose County Courthouse provides four lanes of public parking. In the latter decades of the 20th century, Centerville, like many other small American communities, experienced a change in its retail economy as many long-established locally owned shops closed, due in large part to loss of business to large nationally owned retailers. Many of the former stores have been replaced by specialty gift shops and antique stores, catering to tourists as well as locals.

In 1999, the Lake Center Mall was destroyed by an act of arson. The entire site sat unoccupied until a cineplex and a Pizza Ranch were built there in the early 2000s.

In 1984, the Appanoose County Community Railroad was formed out of discarded pieces of the Wabash and Rock Island lines to maintain a rail link to the outside world. Forming the railroad helped to bring Rubbermaid to the city.

Since the 1990s, Centerville has focused on quality-of-life issues in an attempt to attract and keep young families in the area. A new emphasis on the arts, culture and local history has emerged, culminating in the Townscape project to beautify the Courthouse Square Historic District.

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