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Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52401
Time Machine: Tiny Millville
Clayton County town and its dollars on an inn’s walls
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The village of Millville had the distinction of being the first settlement north of Dubuque in Clayton County.
In 1832, Joseph B. Quigley, R.H. Hatfield, Dan Beasley and William Grant erected a log cabin and sawmill on the Turkey River.
Congress mentioned Millville as part of a proposed postal route in 1846. Route 4551 would go “from Dubuque, Dubuque county, by Pin Oak and Millville, to Jacksonville (now Garnavillo), 43 miles and back once a week.” The route left Dubuque at 5 a.m. and arrived in Jacksonville by 7 p.m.
In 1859, in a descriptive tour of the “interior of Iowa,” Frank Palmer, editor of the Daily Times of Dubuque, wrote, “Halting at Millville, several miles south of Guttenberg long enough to get dinner at the hotel of Mr. J.C. Husentter, we took a few, a very few, notes of the place.
“It is located on the Turkey river, and in a narrow valley with large bluffs on either side of it. There is some waterpower at that point, and Millville has two grist mills, making it a place of resort for many farmers in the neighborhood.
“There is one store in the place, also two or three machine shops.. . . The population of Millville is less than one hundred. How long its ‘day of small things’ is to remain, time must determine.”
Millville’s “day of small things” lasted more than a century.
Millville pioneers
Millville was mentioned in a 1909 Des Moines Register story about Clayton County pioneers.
Jeremiah Roser carried the mail from age 16, stopping for the night in Millville, “where the noise of Joseph Quigley’s mill, the only manufacturing establishment in the county, greeted him.”
The post office at Millville was known as the Turkey River post office, overseen by Isaac Preston.
Highway 52 was transformed from a mud road to a paved roadway in 1929.
Because the terrain was difficult to prepare for the roadway, the state spent $100,000 a mile ($1,857,725 today). In the next few years, Highway 52 would be paved from Dubuque north to Highway 18 west of McGregor, through Millville. The road – from four miles south of Millville to Guttenberg – was redirected. It only touched the original road in a few places.
That was amazing to area patriarch Philo Kenyon, 73, who owned the town’s brick store. The new highway would pass right in front of his business, which served 50 residents, and the Little Turkey River merged with the big Turkey River near Kenyon’s store.
The new roadway alleviated the wash-out flooding nearly every spring.
In 1949, the old Millville Creamery was purchased by Harvey and Lois Kulper. The first floor was remodeled into a restaurant, while the second floor became the family living quarters.
The business was raided in 1952 by Clayton County Sheriff Forest Fisher and state agents for serving liquor. Kulper pleaded innocent. His trial date was to be set later, but if it ever occurred, it wasn’t published.
Elmer Hansel bought the inn in 1968, a year after the town filed articles of incorporation.
All 12 of Millville’s registered voters turned out for a mayoral election in 1979.
Dollars on the walls
Fritz and Marilyn Errthum went on a date to the bar in Millville in 1949 and bought it from Hansel in 1983.
One of the establishment’s quirks started before the Errthums’ time as owners. Partiers at a kegger had decided to tape dollar bills to the inn’s walls. Other patrons liked the idea and more bills were taped on.
The Errthums announced they were selling the bar in April 1989 and would be leaving the 275 bills on the walls for the new owners.
“They’re not really ours,” Marilyn Errthum said. “They’re the people’s. They go with the place.”
In 1999, the Millville area almost got a 197-acre all-terrain vehicle riding park, sponsored by the Northeast Iowa Action Trail Riders Club, but complaints from neighbors to the Iowa Department of Natural Resources squelched the plan.
Millville former mayor James Hankes recalled the town once had two grocery stores, four gas stations, two taverns, a creamery and restaurants. But by the early 2000s, Millville’s election ballots were always blank.
Flooding in 2013 caused the Millville Steakhouse to close.
The end of Millville
Clayton County Auditor Dennis Freitag in 2014 said officials were elected by write-ins. That year, Millville officially ceased to exist. Its 29 residents voted to unincorporate the village because of the difficulty in getting anyone to run for office.
The town’s documents were sent to the Clayton County courthouse to be stored and government functions became the responsibility of the county.
The Cassville Car Ferry, which started operating in 1987 between Cassville, Wis., and the Iowa landing at Millville, still operates about 130 days a year.
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