75. George C. Duffield

George Crawford Duffield (1824 – 1908) was an Iowa pioneer settler, diarist, historian, and director and superintendent of the Iowa State Fair.  Born in Steubenville, Ohio, he was one of nine children of James and Margaret Duffield, who ferried their ox-drawn wagon across the Mississippi River at Fort Madison on March 9, 1837. The family crossed the Des Moines River (in what is now Van Buren County near Pittsburg) and settled on land the furthest west of any claim in the state. Young Duffield and his siblings made friends with the local Sac and Fox children and received what little education they could from his mother using “an old worn ‘blue-back’ Webster’s Spelling Book.”

In 1849, Duffield traveled by sail and foot via the Isthmus of Panama to California in search of gold. Successful in his quest, he returned to Iowa and purchased land near his family in 1852. During the American Civil War, Duffield served as a scout with Company G of the Third Iowa Cavalry and in 1866, he and a companion drove 1,300 cattle from Texas to Ottumwa, where they shipped the herd by rail to the stockyards of Chicago. Duffield was present at the first meeting of the Iowa State Agricultural Society in 1853, attended the first Iowa State Fair in Fairfield, and only missed four subsequent fairs before his death in 1908. Duffield also attended the era’s great Expositions in Philadelphia, Chicago, Buffalo, Omaha, and St. Louis.

Duffield began keeping a diary in 1860 and from this he drew recollections of his early pioneering days. His son-in-law, attorney Edgar R. Harlan, assisted Duffield in researching, writing, and publishing his recollections in the Annals of Iowa beginning in 1903. This work brought Harlan to the attention of state historian Charles Aldrich, who appointed Harlan as the second director and curator of the Historical Department of Iowa in 1908. In 1932, Duffield’s grandson, Philip Duffield Stong, published the semi-autobiographical novel State Fair and used the proceeds from the book (and later films) to purchase his ancestor’s 400-acre homestead farm in 1937.