Mills County, Iowa

Silver City Community History
1879 - 1979

IT’S NOT A GHOST TOWN EXCEPT MAYBE ON SUNDAYS

Iowa’s Silver City, where all dreams didn’t come true, but 300 people are happy. The name Silver City suggests the old west . . . a cattle town or mining village with weathered brick and false front buildings lining a sun-baked, dusty main street. Men gazing out from the shade of sidewalk canopies, their horses standing in rows at the high curb; wagons crowded around a general store and buggies around the proud hotel on the corner. Now such scenes are gone and remain only as movie shots and ghosts among the remains of deserted groups of buildings standing on lonely prairies and mountainsides.

Iowa has a Silver City ... quite appropriately in western Iowa, in Mills County, and if you should drive into town on a Sunday you will find yourself in a “ghost town’ quite authentic in appearance and atmosphere. There are the old brick and false front buildings, old dates and names prominent in the town’s history marking the upper stories. There are the sidewalk canopies, the dusty Main Street with its high curbs . . . all is quiet and vacant.

The more history you know of Silver City the more ghosts you are aware of as you move along the dusty street. The town was established in the fall of 1879 near the banks of Silver Creek and as a station on the newly- built Wabash Railroad. By the time it was incorporated in 1883 the population stood near 500. Great hopes and plans for the city’s future were under way. Stores were built, a bank was established, and a hotel was built on the corner. Silver City was fast becoming a trading and social center of Mills County. A race trace was laid out north of the business district that drew crowds from all over the county. In 1899 Silver City held a huge Mills County Soldiers Reunion, the Silver City Cornet Band providing the “live spectacular” for entertainment. Fine homes and churches spread out on the hill west of town and all prepared for the booming history just ahead.

There was no spectacular boom, no great industrial expansion, no great population growth. Other towns got the highways, other towns got the seats of government, other towns got the factories, and other towns got much of Silver City’s younger generations. There were fires and there were droughts on the surrounding farm land.

However, Silver City isn’t a true ghost town. About 300 people live there and if you come back on Monday you will find the old west atmosphere pushed into the background by healthy activity. Delivery trucks roll into town to supply the stores. The interior of the old blacksmith shop flashes with light from the acetylene torch. Workers return to their task of tearing down the second story of the old opera house, unused by the Masonic Lodge on the first floor. Modern street lights arch gracefully over the street. The town pump still in use but city water mains were put in last year. Over the Community Fire House a Ground Observer Tower is manned as a precaution against fire of an international order.

So during the week Silver City thrives in its own small town way, the people quite happy and content with the way Silver City turned out. But Sundays the town rests and Main Street once again takes on the old west look, and about the only traffic is the blowing wind and the “ghosts” of the past ... looking down from the old brick and false front buildings. By Frank Miller Des Moines Sunday Register, July 8, 1956 (Permission was given by Des Moines Register for the reprint.)

~submitted by Roseanna Zehner & Darlene Jacoby