Le Mars city i Plymouth county i Iowa i USA

Arkiv: United_States_Genealogy
Länk: Le Mars, Iowa

Le Mars was platted in 1869, but no lots were sold until the Iowa Falls and Sioux City Railroad, later part of the Illinois Central Railroad, arrived in 1870. Railroad magnate John I. Blair hosted an excursion to the new town, which was then called St. Paul Junction.

Blair asked the women in the excursion to name the town, and they submitted an acronym based upon their first names' initials: Lucy Ford and Laura Walker, Ellen Cleghorn or Elizabeth Underhill, Martha Weare and Mary Weare, Adeline Swain, Rebecca Smith and Sarah Reynolds. (Note that some letters represent more than one person.) There was some subsequent uncertainty about who the women of the acronym actually were. For example, the city's web page contains a somewhat different list.

During the Great Depression in 1933, at a time when banks were foreclosing on many farmers, Le Mars caught the attention of the nation when ”over five hundred farmers crowded the court room in Le Mars”, according to an account by historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.. The farmers were there to demand that Judge Charles C. Bradley suspend foreclosure proceedings until recently passed laws could be considered. Judge Bradley refused. One farmer remarked that the court room wasn't his alone, that farmers had paid for it with their taxes. The crowd rushed the judge, slapped him, and placed a rope around his neck and a hub cap on his head. They did not, however lynch him.