Agatha Beiderbecke asked a close family friend, Albert Petersen, to listen to her seven-year-old son play the piano. According to the biography Bix, Man and Legend, Petersen could hardly contain his enthusiasm. “Agatha, this boy has something.” He said. “Keep me informed about his progress – and whatever you do, get him some piano lessons.” One might expect a friend – and her cousin’s husband – to be encouraging. But Petersen was also one of Davenport’s leading musicians, bandleaders, and teachers. He also began his career in music at a young age.

A life-size bronze sculpture, Lincoln with Boy on Bridge, stands in downtown Davenport’s Bechtel Park near the Arsenal Bridge. Abraham Lincoln stands on a railroad track gazing forward; a seated boy looks up to him. Jeff Adams’ sculpture depicts a small moment between events that brought America closer to Civil War.

Following his graduation from West Point, Lieutenant Napoleon Buford surveyed the Rock Island and Des Moines rapids on the Mississippi River in the late 1820s. The rapids were a major obstacle for steamboats navigating the river above St. Louis. According to a U.S. Corps of Engineers report, “His maps, though general, were quite accurate, considering that he made his surveys in February, with a foot of ice and nine inches of snow covering the river.”

One of the people who shaped Davenport was a Hungarian nobleman. What were the odds? Count Nicholas Fejervary (Miklós Fejérváry) came to Davenport when he was 41 years old. He left his native Hungary to escape the imposed martial law that followed the failed revolutions that swept Europe in 1847 and 1848. Friends had been exiled, imprisoned, even executed. He chose to settle in Davenport because it reminded him of his home on the Danube.