In his newspaper column in today's Moline Dispatch, Greg Aguilar reminds of how the Quad Cities area towns of Andalusia and Cordova got their names.
Many people don't realize this fact, but the Spanish Empire reached the state of Iowa and a small piece of Illinois. Some of our area cities share their name with cities of Spain like Andalusia and Cordova. It is kind of funny that at one point in our history, Spanish was the official language of the Quad-Cities.
Read the entire article.
Since this is Columbus Day I thought it would be appropriate to also reflect on how the nearby town of Milan got its name during the brief period when this area was part of the Italian empire. The large number of pizza parlors in the Quad Cities are also a legacy of this period. If you know where to look you can still find reminders of a time when all public institutions had Italian names. In the back of the prison in East Moline there is a place where you can see written in large letters on the ground the former name of the old East Moline State Hospital, 'Ospedale psichiatrico di Watertown.'