Early Davenport had a lot of two things: bars and churches.<\/p>\n
It would be difficult to document all the places that might have offered our citizens refreshments of an alcoholic nature prior to 1880; many of them didn’t exist long enough to be listed in city directories—or the owners didn’t want them listed, in case the authorities came around asking about licenses—and drinking establishments weren’t often mentioned in local histories.<\/p>\n
But churches and synagogues were listed in city directories—often for free—mentioned at length in local histories, and were likely to appear a variety of other resources. And they often published histories of their own.<\/p>\n
If one were to glean location information about these pre-1880 Davenport churches and synagogues from these sources and plug it into a map, it would look like this:
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