01/03/2026
FORBUSH, IOWA
APPANOOSE COUNTY
How about another place that makes your head spin to think there was once a town there? Forbush was only located halfway (and slightly to the east) between Rathbun and Centerville, though little remains to suggest a town was there. Soon after the railroad was completed from Moravia to Centerville in 1880, the Whitebreast Fuel Company, an eastern firm, bought land in the area and began exploring for coal. Silas Augustus Forbush was sent from Chicago to help manage sales, and the mining operation soon drew workers and their families to the site. Joseph P. Schenck, a bookkeeper for the mine and brother-in-law to Forbush, was part of the early operation. What started as a coal venture quickly became a town that took its name from the man overseeing it.
Forbush was platted with Highway Avenue along its south edge. Streets named Brazil, Central, Mystic, and Timber ran east and west, crossed by Summit, Main, Relay, and Lake streets running north and south. By 1896, the plat map showed sixty-five homes, a hotel, and a public school. A post office had been established in 1890. Laid out along the Iowa Central Railway, the town also had a Western Union office and a handful of businesses that met everyday needs.
The Whitebreast Fuel Company opened Mine No. 19 west of the railroad in 1891. It was a vertical shaft mine, sixty-five feet deep, and more than eighty acres were eventually worked. Mining was dangerous work. In 1895, John Steemer, a miner originally from Austria, was killed when he was crushed by a fall of slate. Conditions like these led miners to organize. Union activity arrived in the area in 1891, including early groups that would evolve into the United Mine Workers. John Reynolds, an attorney in Albia, served as president of the newly formed union, and southern Iowa became an important early center of organized coal labor. In Forbush, the company controlled much of daily life. The store was company-owned, and miners were often paid in orders redeemable only there, keeping wages circulating back to the company.
Coal mining ended at Forbush around 1901. Shale from the mine was later loaded onto rail cars and spread along railroad beds and county roads. The post office closed in 1905, and the company town faded away. None of the original houses remain. Today, only a few scattered homes line what is now 490th Street. One small cemetery, now overgrown, contains a single known grave, and a ghost town monument marks the location.
