40 Famous Iowans - Thomas Terrill

Thomas Terrill was born in Virginia in 1850. When Terrill was three years old, the family moved to Cedar County, Iowa where they started their own farm. By the time Thomas was eleven, he and his siblings were orphans as both his parents had died by this time. Thomas went to live with the Blaylock family and moved with them down to Keokuk, Iowa. By age twenty-one, Thomas started writing the diaries he is so well known for. Thomas Terrill had no formal education. The diaries span from 1871-1912. As was the case with so many other diarists of this time, Terrill wrote most about his day-to-day activities on the farm.

Although most of the diaries recovered by Terrill had to do with farming, later in his life he began traveling and several accounts of these times can be found as well. The diaries are an interesting read for those who desire more information on what farming was like every day during this time period. Today many of Terrill’s diaries can be found in Iowa colleges and museums.

40 Famous Iowans - Kitturah Penton Belknap

Kitturah Belknap was one of the very first pioneer settlers in Iowa. She came among the groups of the first settlers as a “trail woman” who kept pushing further west into the uncharted land. Several trail women settled in Iowa, but only a handful went further west, including Belknap. She did eventually finish her journey with the others in Oregon. These trail women challenged the stereotype of women being weak and insecure.

Belknap’s diaries give us so much insight on what the days were like for everybody out on the trail. She wrote about every detail about each day on the trail such as people passed, weather and terrain and even when they came across a nice family who offered a place to stay the night. Kitturah Belknap’s diaries give us as much information about the hardships faced everyday by the travelers. Belknap was a jack-of-all-trades on the trails. She helped with everything from navigating to cooking, even to helping the men save fellow travelers who had been taken during ambushes. She was a highly regarded woman in her group, and is highly regarded today as well.

40 Famous Iowans - Norman Borlaug

The “father” of the Green Revolution is said to have saved at least one billion people worldwide with his advances agricultural research. Norman Borlaug is one of the few men ever to win the Nobel Peace Prize, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Congressional Medal of Honor as well as a medal in India. Borlaug won his Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. When he was informed of this by his wife he thought for some time that it was all a big hoax. His work with producing stronger variations of wheat more than doubled wheat production in Mexico, Pakistan, India, Asia and Africa, saving people from starvation. Norman Borlaug however did not just work on food production to help fight starvation. His other fight was that against deforestation, called the “Borlaug Hypothesis”. The hypothesis states, increasing the productivity of agriculture on the best farmland can help control deforestation by reducing the demand for new farmland.

Borlaug grew up around Cresco, Iowa where he was very active in high school sports. If it weren’t for his father telling him to get his education, he very well may have never left the family farm. His college career was done through a Minnesota two-year college then eventually Minnesota University. He did research for the United States Army after Pearl Harbor and created wartime products they were in need of. He researched and produced disease-resistant and dwarfed wheat to help the production flourish worldwide. In 1986 he created the World Food Prize as a way to distinguish people who helped sustain and advance food production in the world. Later in his life, he became a very distinguished professor in Texas. Borlaug’s achievements in his life saved the lives of so many others.

40 Famous Iowans - Henry A. Wallace

Henry A. Wallace led a very busy and politically impressive life. Wallace graduated from the Iowa State College (Iowa State University) in Ames. Wallace’s father was Henry C. Wallace, the famous editor in Des Moines. Henry A. Wallace himself did some editorial work for Wallace’s Farmer from 1910-1924. He did some studies on corn a little later in his life and published several agriculture articles on the subject. Wallace started a small seed company which today is Pioneer Hi-Bred. It was acquired by DuPont back in 1990 for around ten billion dollars.

He spent much of his life exploring different religious beliefs. His beliefs even took him to working closely with the Russian, Nicholas Roerich. Eventually Wallace decided on Episcopalianism. In 1933, he became Secretary of Agriculture to Franklin Roosevelt’s cabinet; he served this position until 1940. November of 1940, Wallace was elected as Vice President, on the ticket with Franklin Roosevelt. At this position, Wallace was in charge of a couple different boards that proved to be very important to the United States Army as they entered World War 2. Other milestones in his career were the Secretary of Commerce in 1945, and he ran for President in 1948 as a part of the Progressive Party. After his years as a Politician he went back to the life of a farmer. During these years he made several advances in agricultural science. In 1965, Wallace died of Lou Gehrig’s disease, but his agricultural and political accomplishments will long be remembered.

40 Famous Iowans - William G. Murray

The founder of Living History Farms was born in 1903 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. In 1924 he received his B.A. in economics from Coe College, his M.A. from Harvard University in 1925 and his PhD in 1932 from Minnesota University in agricultural economics. For a brief period of time in the mid 1920s Murray served as a graduate assistant in the agricultural economics department at Iowa State. For a brief period after this he served as the Assistant Agricultural Economist with the United States Department of Agriculture then returned to Iowa State as an assistant professor.

In 1958 and 1966 Murray ran unsuccessfully for Governor of Iowa. The Farms takes visitors on a tour of 300 years of history of farming. But he was passionate about giving back to Iowa and had a dream of creating a museum where visitors didn’t just look at static items under glass, but were able to participate in a “living history” museum. In 1970, he founded Living History Farms. The Farms recreated 300 years of agricultural history. A 1700 Ioway Indian Farm, an 1875 faming town, and a 1900 horse-powered farm. Each farm has authentically- grown crops and historic varieties of livestock. Although Dr. Murray died 1991, his dream lives on today at Living History Farms.

40 Famous Iowans - Chief Mahaska (White Cloud)

The Ioway chief was born in the late 1700s along the Des Moines River in southeast Iowa. He became chief at a young age due to the murder of his father by an enemy tribe during an ambush. Mahaska proved himself however during a retaliatory attack on the Dakota tribe, killing its chief. The chief and another member of the tribe were arrested for the murder of two French-speaking traders. Although the two were convicted, they later managed to escape from prison. It is said that many questions regarding legitimacy of the jurisdiction was in question, but ignored. During his time as leader, in the early 1800s, the leader position became harder to handle as the tribe dealt with diseases and almost constant war with other tribes. In 1819, Sauk and Meskwaki warriors ambushed the main Ioway village killing close to a third of its population. Another huge problem Mahaska and his tribe faced were settlers moving into the Ioway tribe’s land. Soon after this Missouri was annexed as a state, taking away millions of acres from the Ioway. Mahaska realized it would be impossible to fight everyone off, so he began working on a peaceful coexistence with the new neighbors.

Later in his life, he moved down to the area of Agency, Missouri where he began a lifestyle like that of the Anglo-American. From this point on, Mahaska was against any kind of physical violence. Every time fights broke out he did all he could to seek peaceful resolutions. Even when Mahaska’s own son was killed, he found “revenge” in assisting in the arrests of the eight who were involved in the plot around Omaha. However, in 1833, one of the men convicted of the murder escaped prison, tracked down Mahaska and murdered the beloved Ioway chief.

40 Famous Iowans - Governor Robert Ray

Robert Ray served as Iowa’s 38^th Governor from 1969-1983. From Drake University he received both his B.A. in 1952 and his Law Degree in 1955. It was during Ray’s time in office that the Iowa Constitution was changed, giving governors four-year terms instead of two. From 1975-1976 Ray served as the chair of the National Governors Association. Other associations he was the chairman of included: Republican Governors Association, Midwestern Governors Association, and the Education Commission of the State and was the president of the Council of State Governments. The executive orders he promoted ranged from civil rights, energy conservation, paperwork reduction as well as several other important issues. Ray also had the pleasure of being Iowa’s first Governor to call the Terrace Hill Mansion, home.

He also put a lot of time and effort into the United Nations Conference starting in 1979. He received the Iowa Award in 2005, which is the highest civilian honor that can be attained. In 1975, Ray set up ways for fleeing Vietnamese to take refuge in the United States and eventually obtain citizenship. Ray enacted the first laws in the nation protecting Native American burial grounds in 1976. Later, in 1982, Ray was the first recipient of the Cristine Wilson Medal for Equality and Justice. Robert Ray was an extremely popular Governor who still to this day has an active role in public affairs for Iowa.