By any standard, Bettendorf, Iowa, is a fairly young city, having awakened from its sleepy rural beginnings in the nineteenth century to become an industrial center in the first half of the twentieth century and, now, on the precipice of a new millennium, it is a city becoming what is yet unrealized, but not unimagined. With more than two hundred historic photographs, this volume offers up chapters of American history in its stories from the heartland: a packet of seeds that started an agricultural dynasty; a slave who took a stand for freedom and changed the course of the nation; two brothers, one with a mind full of innovative ideas and the other with a knack for business; a community that would not lay down and die in the depths of the Great Depression; and a new generation of civic leaders who took a second look at the great river that had long flowed quietly by and found a renewed strength in the promise of its constancy.