Pg 525
April 25, 1867, forty resident legal voters of Durant petitioned the County Court to appoint Commissioners to call an election for the purpose of voting upon the propriety of incorporating Durant as a town.
The Clerk of Court accordingly issued a warrant, July 5, 1867, to that effect, and as result, the town was incorporated. Allen Nesbitt was first elected Mayor.
About the same time, Durant became an independent School District.
The same year, the town part was planted with shade trees, and in a few years it will be just the place for picnics and 4th of July celebrations.
Pg 526
During the Spring of 1873, the citizens of the town and the vicinity organized a company for the manufacture of cheese, of which Mr. C. Orcutt was president; under his superintendence, the company put up a two-story building 32x50, with all the modern improvements, where a practical cheese maker from Elgin, Ill., was engaged in the manufacture of cheese of the first quality.
The surrounding country is well settled, and many of the farms are adorned with fine dwellings and large out-buildings surrounded with thrifty shade trees; the soil is deep and fertile making it one of the best farming sections in the State or Union, while the facilities for either an eastern, southern or western market make it very desirable for agricultural or stock purposes; consequently many farms change hands at advanced rates.
A narrow gauge railroad from Davenport to the Northwest via Cedar Rapids was projected in 1873, and surveys made via Durant, but nothing further was heard of it.
At a depth of thirty-five or forty feet in coarse gravel, an unfailing supply of excellent water is obtained, and with its two capacious tanks and wind mill Durant is the best water station on the road.
The present population is about five hundred. The population of Durant has changed two or three times. It was at the first composed chiefly of settlers from Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Maine and Connecticut. Germans have now almost entirely supplanted them.
