IAIowa Famous People

A two room cottage in West Branch, fourteen feet by twenty, produced the first president born west of the Mississippi River. Herbert Hoover was born there on August 10, 1874, orphaned by nine, and put on a train to an uncle in Oregon at eleven. The cottage still stands, and his grave sits on the hill above it. That combination of a very small starting point and a very large outcome runs through most of the names on this page.

Herbert Hoover and Henry Wallace

Hoover talked his way into the first class at Stanford in 1891 with weak paperwork and a good exam score, trained as a geologist and made a fortune managing mines in Australia and China. During the First World War he ran the relief operation that fed occupied Belgium, then the US Food Administration, then European reconstruction. He was president from 1929 to 1933, took the blame for the Depression, lived another three decades and was buried back in West Branch in 1964.

Iowa's other national figure sits one rung below. Henry A. Wallace was born on a farm near Orient in 1888, founded the Hi-Bred Corn Company in 1926 and put hybrid seed into fields across the Midwest. He served as Roosevelt's Secretary of Agriculture, then as vice president from 1941 to 1945 until the party replaced him with Harry Truman at the 1944 convention, a swap that decided who would take office three months into the next term. He ran for president himself in 1948 on the Progressive ticket.

The two Iowans everyone can name

John Wayne was born Marion Robert Morrison on May 26, 1907 in a four room house on South Second Street in Winterset. The family left for California when he was seven, and a fire station dog called Duke gave him the nickname that stuck. Grant Wood was born on a farm near Anamosa in 1891 and painted American Gothic in 1930 after spotting a small white farmhouse with an incongruous Gothic window in Eldon. The two figures in front of it are his sister Nan and his Cedar Rapids dentist, Byron McKeeby. It won a $300 prize at the Art Institute of Chicago and became the most parodied painting in the country.

A Nobel wheat breeder and a Tuskegee scientist

Norman Borlaug was born near Cresco on March 25, 1914 and walked to a one room schoolhouse. His work crossing dwarf, disease resistant wheat varieties in Mexico from the 1940s onward doubled and tripled yields across South Asia, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 for it. His statue has represented Iowa in the US Capitol since 2014.

George Washington Carver was born into slavery in Missouri and turned away from a Kansas college when they saw him in person. Iowa took him. He was the first Black student at what is now Iowa State University in Ames, finished a bachelor's degree in 1894 and a master's in 1896, became its first Black faculty member, and left only because Booker T. Washington asked him to run the agriculture department at Tuskegee. The University of Iowa's Writers' Workshop, founded in 1936 as the first creative writing degree programme in the country, has since put a long line of Pulitzer winners through Iowa City, including Flannery O'Connor, who took her degree there in 1947.

Entertainers Iowa gets no credit for

Buffalo Bill Cody was born in Le Claire on February 26, 1846 and invented the touring American entertainment spectacle. Johnny Carson was born in Corning in 1925 before the family moved to Nebraska. Glenn Miller came from Clarinda, led the most popular band in America and vanished over the English Channel in December 1944. Bix Beiderbecke taught himself cornet by ear in Davenport and was dead at twenty eight. Donna Reed grew up on a farm outside Denison and won an Oscar in 1954. Cloris Leachman came from Des Moines, Andy Williams from Wall Lake, and Ashton Kutcher and Elijah Wood were both born in Cedar Rapids, three years apart.

Two identical twins born in Sioux City on July 4, 1918, Esther Pauline and Pauline Esther Friedman, grew up to write Ask Ann Landers and Dear Abby, the two most read advice columns in the world, in open competition with each other. Bill Bryson was born in Des Moines in 1951. And Ronald Reagan spent five years at WHO in Des Moines re-creating Chicago Cubs games from telegraph reports, which is how he ended up in California in 1937 and, from there, in front of a camera.

Wrestlers, quarterbacks and a scoring record

Dan Gable, born in Waterloo in 1948, lost one match in his entire high school and college career, won Olympic gold at Munich in 1972 without surrendering a single point to any opponent, then coached the University of Iowa to fifteen NCAA team titles. Bob Feller was signed off a Van Meter farm at sixteen, struck out seventeen batters in a game at seventeen, and enlisted in the Navy two days after Pearl Harbor, giving up nearly four seasons in his prime. Kurt Warner went undrafted out of Northern Iowa and stocked grocery shelves in Cedar Falls before becoming the MVP of Super Bowl XXXIV. Zach Johnson of Iowa City won the 2007 Masters and the 2015 Open Championship. Caitlin Clark, from West Des Moines, became the all time leading scorer in Division I basketball in 2024.

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