History of Concord Township
HISTORY OF THE COUNTIES OF
Genealogy for Woodbury County, Iowa, USA. Click here for the HOME page.
This information courtesy of the Woodbury County Genealogical Society.
Concord Township was created September 3, 1873, and
organized under the name o£ Joy township, but by petition of citizens
interested, that title was changed in January, 1871, to Concord. Following is
the order of the supervisors: "All of township eighty-nine, range forty-six, to
be detached from Sioux City township and formed into a new township to be called
Joy township." The boundaries are Plymouth County on the north, Woodbury and
Floyd townships on the south, Banner on the east and Sioux City on the west.
Owing to the proximity of Concord to Sioux City, the
township has rather been overshadowed in the way of any kind of business or
other enterprise than farming. There is no post-office, no church, no stove, no
tavern, no mill and no railroad, with the exception of jus a touch of the iron
rails at the extreme northwestern point of the northwestern section, number six,
but no station. The limits of Sioux City on the east is the line of Concord, and
to that thriving city all things trend in the township. But the land is fine,
although broken and very rolling. Here it is that one may see the singular
beauty of this extraordinary landscape. To pass over it leaves the impression of
being very much elevated, and o£ course it is correct, but it is not higher than
the rolling prairie lauds in the interior of the state. Immense regularly
rounded waves of the richest soil on earth, with the possible exception of the
valleys of the Nile and Amazon, rise up to the view on every hand, all green and
seemingly shaven with a lawn-mower as clean cut as a landscape gardener could do
it. Only the fields of waving corn diversify the surface, and in July, here and
there in the distance, may be seen a field of golden wheat. The wonderful depth
of this soil is marvelous, and its richness beyond the conception of the
ordinary eastern farmer. A recent writer in a leading periodical, discourses so
well and analytically upon the soil of this section that an extended quotation
from the same will be here made: "Dr. Hoyden, in his report to the government,
says this soil contains over thirty per cent of phosphates of lime. Indian
traditions that have been handed down show the extraordinary productiveness of
this section to have been well known to them, for in this vicinity, at the mouth
of the Floyd, the Big Sioux and the James rivers, they cultivated their corn,
and in the fall of the year, before going on a hunt, ‘cached’ the crops in large
excavations carefully concealed from rival tribes. The chief advantage of this
soil, however, lies not merely in its exceptional fertility, but its marvelous
capacity to resist the effects of both drought and rainfall. As a matter of
fact, a failure of the corn crop is unknown here. An examination of the soil
shows that the surface of this section is one mass of pulverized deposit varying
in depth from 100 to 200 feet it forms both the soil and subsoil. Its fineness
is due to the soft composition of two rocks of this vicinity which readily
crumbled away under atmospheric influences and glacial action into an unfathomed
deposit of inexhaustible productiveness. Now, remembering that this soil is at
least 100 feet deep before the stratified rooks are reached, two vital
consequences follow: In the first place there are near the surface, no indurated
clay or rock strata to retain excessive moisture, consequently the soil is
naturally under drained and can absorb an amount of rain fall that would be
disastrous in any other place in the world. On account of the same conditions no
other soil can equally resist the effects of drought. The vast depth of fine
deposit acts as a sponge whereas a thinner sod in a hard basis would soon be
impoverished'
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