Ghost Signs of Eastern Iowa

Mississippi River towns are the best, and I envy all of you who have never visited any of them. They almost always have interesting 19th century and early 20th century buildings, and their sloping topography guarantees unexpected staircases, unusually steep streets, exposed two-story basements, and other oddments. 

I've seen most of the ones in Minnesota and Wisconsin at some point in the past 35 years, and so after my recent trip to Denver on the train (which took me briefly through some of Iowa's towns on the California Zephyr), I thought I should visit more of its river towns. Previously, I had only seen Dubuque — which is very nice! It has a funicular, speaking of things you see in cities that have steep inclines.

So last weekend we took a jaunt to Davenport (the largest municipality in the Quad Cities), with a day trip to Burlington, which is an hour and a bit south of Davenport. They both were fairly major ports and railroad junctions in the 19th century. Burlington put that name into the Burlington Northern Railroad (which I never knew until I found it out while reading the town's Wikipedia page on the way to Denver). Davenport is across the river from Rock Island, as in the Rock Island Line.

Davenport is a much larger place, with about 100,000 people; Burlington is just about 1/10 that size. The Quad Cities as a whole has about 475,000 people, with the addition of Rock Island and Moline, Illinois, and Bettendorf, Iowa — plus their various suburbs.

Both places must have had brick factories, though, judging by their downtown buildings. And there are plenty of ghost signs, especially in Burlington. (As always, click the images to enlarge.)

This was in the warehouse area of Burlington, a few blocks from the railroad station. 

Along the edge of the warehouse area of Burlington, near the business district. Adjacent to some renovated apartment lofts.

A ghost sign's ghost sign, just barely visible.

In downtown Burlington, this almost unreadable Dehner's First... something sign was painted a story above a small florist shop, which is next to a spot that used to be something. I don't know if the adjacent very small building burned or was torn down, but the haphazard mortaring of the cinder blocks indicates that the side of that building was not meant to be seen by the public. (Note the hilly street that begins to rise with the railing to the right.)

On the way out of Burlington, two last ghost signs on one building, one more ghostly than the other.

In Davenport itself, we saw this:

It's a neon ghost sign. I'm not sure I've seen many if any of those before, especially one for a real estate company. Not exactly the kind of thing I think of seeing lit up in lights at night: "List anything – Selling everything."

In Moline, across the river from Davenport, we saw this machine shop that's still in operation, though maybe not by the original company:

This kind of hand-painted sign across the front of brick machine shops was incredibly common back then. It's a quintessential piece of Americana.