The Muscatine Art Center—Laura Musser Museum & Stanley Gallery is very passionate about the preservation of Muscatine County’s history. In the spring of 2019, they received a copy of the book titled Ardon 1901—1954, History of a Small Town in “76” Township Muscatine Co., Iowa by Howard A. Healey, 1979.

     Mr. Healey self-published this book. He passed away on October 15, 1992. As it was a limited edition, to preserve this publication, the Muscatine Art Center scanned all of the 771 pages, and placed it into their permanent collection.

     In a letter dated August 12, 2019 from The Muscatine Art Center—Laura Musser Museum & Stanley Gallery, Virginia Cooper, Registrar, gave to Lynn McCleary a copy of all the scanned images of the pages. Permission was given for volunteers to transcribe them, and then Lynn McCleary was instructed to convert the material into HTML and place them on the Muscatine Co. IAGenWeb site.

     This History of a Small Town in “76” Township, contains a collection of newspaper articles extracted from the Muscatine area from 1901 to 1954. Once upon a time this town was booming due to the railroad. Today there isn’t much still standing.

     As the book did not have page numbers, a table of contents or an index, Lynn has attempted to facilitate this publication’s study by developing the following Table of Contents to make it searchable.

     Page numbers have been established according to sequence of the scanned pages. The title (head line) is given along with the date it was published in the newspaper.

     We are very grateful to the Muscatine Art Center for sharing this book with us; to Mike Wedell, who was able to convert the scanned images into Word documents; and to the generous volunteers who edited and formatted the text.

PROJECT COMPLETED!