Iowa Joins Union

December 28, 1846

Carved out of the Louisiana Purchase, Iowa entered the Union as the twenty-ninth state and as a free state to balance slave-state Florida. The Missouri Compromise line still held, barely. Settlers poured in, German and Irish and Yankee, to break the tallgrass prairie under John Deere's steel-bladed plow. Within a decade Iowa's black soil would make it one of the richest agricultural regions on the planet.