of
Muscatine County Iowa
1911
| History of Muscatine County Iowa 1911 | |
Source: History of Muscatine County Iowa, Volume I, 1911, pages 403-404
RECOLLECTIONS OF A PIONEER BANKER. A man who figured very prominently in business and banking circles of Muscatine in the callow youth of the city, was F. L. Underwood, who removed from here in the '70s and went into the banking business at Kansas City, Missouri, and from there to New York city, where he now resides. In 1901 Mr. Underwood became reminiscent and contributed to the columns of the Muscatine Journal a valuable and interesting account of banking in the west fifty (now) years ago. The article is here reproduced that it may be preserved, because of its value to the future historian of this locality:
Banking in the west forty years ago was a much more difficult business than it is today. Capital had not been accumulated so that the borrower had less upon which to base his loan; security was therefore unreliable; conditions were unstable; currency was scarce and fluctuating violently in value from time to time, often from day to day; bank failures were of frequent occurrence; transportation lines were fewer and subject to more frequent interruption, so that all was uncertain when the best interests of the community and bankers alike were subserved by certainty.
There were porportionately fewer trained bankers for the new towns constantly springing up all over the western prairies. The merchants of today became the bankers of tomorrow.
The law incorporating the State Bank of Iowa, adopted by the state legislature in 1858 or 1859, put our state in the front rank of the western states so far as banks of issue were concerned. It was based largely upon the laws incorporating the state banks of Ohio and Indiana, and in none of these three states were there any failures or losses made in the state banks incorporated under their laws. Most of the banking in Iowa, as in all the western states however, was done by private bankers and it is creditable to them to say that but very few failures occurred among them.
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