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HIAWATHA CORALVILE
to

Hubbard Park, What Lies Below
Just a few miles from your stop in Coralville
is Hubbard Park. Take a quick look at the park
as you ride across the Iowa River along W. Iowa
Avenue early on your final day of the route.
Before it Was a Park

The space served as a residential neighborhood
from 1839 to 1926. Afterward, the University
leveled the block and the area became the Wom-
en’s Athletic Field. Designated a park in 1991, its
namesake is Philip G. Hubbard, the University of
Iowa’s first African-American professor and later Images from 2014 archaeological excavations.
university vice president. The Archaeology
Hubbard Park started out as one of the city’s
earliest residential areas. After the Great Flood of To protect their neighborhood from flooding,
1851, the neighborhood re-emerged in the 1860s residents used soil to raise the block’s eleva-
with a mix of workers’ cottages, larger houses, tion, burying and preserving older occupations.
and a corner grocery store. This was a racially, Excavations in 2014 by the OSA found remains
ethnically, and economically mixed working-class of the old neighborhood, including foundations, a
neighborhood. Many of the houses were rental root cellar, and privy outhouses. American Indian
units; others were single-family homes. Some artifacts demonstrate that people lived here for
families, like the Henyons, were prosperous; thousands of years.
Bradford Henyon was a shingle maker from New Artifacts from the 19th and early 20th centuries
York. Others were not so fortunate and lived reveal the neighborhood’s changing demograph-
in poor conditions. Many residents were immi- ics, allowing us to enrich the historical narrative
grants, like the Rinellas, a Sicilian family who ran of Iowa City. Due to its historic and archaeologi-
a corner grocery store that was the social center cal importance, this neighborhood is eligible for
of the neighborhood in the early 1900s. listing in the National Register of Historic Places.

Former residents of Hubbard
Park. Left: Rachel and Paul
Ward,1890s. Above: the Henyon
brothers, 1840s.