Gowrie in Its Heyday

In its heyday Gowrie was a rather bustling community. As late as the middle 1930s there was an Armour plan dealing in poultry and eggs. Actually the plant killed and processed chickens. The father of one of my high school classmates was at one time the manager of the operation. At that time there were also at least three auto dealerships, two farm implement dealers, three grain elevators, two hardware stores and an assortment of groceries, dry goods stores, etc.

At one time the John Deere company considered Gowrie as the site for a manufacturing facility that was I understand later located farther east at Waterloo, Iowa. That town has now a population of perhaps 100,000, Gowrie has remained at about 1,000 population. Legend has it that the Gowrie city fathers were opposed to the plant. Whether that was the reason for Deere settling elsewhere is conjectural. When I left the community in 1942, Gowrie was still a substantial trading center. Now it is mostly a commuting and retirement community.

Recently (March 1991) I became aware of a sort of history of Gowrie written about 1970 by Richard Carlon and members of the Patton family who were connected with the editing and publishing of the Gowrie News at the time. Howard Nelson had an extra copy which he sent to me and this gives considerable information and the flavor of the community over the years. Most of what is in it was gleaned from old issues of the News which it had in its files. Howard complained that the published history sort of neglected happenings in the surrounding rural areas — it would be an interesting project to spend the time to go through the files and develop a picture of the rural areas. I suppose such a project could be widened to include a similar look at the files of the Fort Dodge Messenger.

I suppose that much of what I wrote about my recollections of Gowrie could be gleaned more accurately from the history mentioned above or from a review of old issues of the Gowrie News.