The Ankeny Brief
Every fast-growing suburb looks like it sprang up overnight. Ankeny didn't - it took exactly 150 years, four fires, a world war, a dairy farm, and one very persistent rail line. Here's the whole story, start to now.
Decades before Ankeny existed as a place at all, the ground north of Fort Des Moines was open prairie under military control, with the local Meskwaki and Sac & Fox people still finishing out land-cession treaties with the U.S. government. The first pioneer families arrived in the mid-1840s - Saylor Township, just south of where Ankeny sits today, is named for John B. Saylor, who settled there in April 1845. It would be another three decades before anyone platted a town nearby.
On July 11, 1874, Des Moines businessman John Fletcher Ankeny and his wife Sarah bought an 80-acre tract along a proposed rail line for $1,600. The following spring they platted the town, recording the plan on April 22, 1875 (laid out April 19) - and named it after themselves.
John Fletcher Ankeny bought the ground the whole town is named for and platted it into streets and lots - but he and his family stayed in Des Moines the entire time. They never moved to Ankeny.
The whole point of the land deal was the railroad. A narrow-gauge line was built from Des Moines through Ankeny to Ames between 1874 and 1880, converted to standard wide gauge by the Chicago & North Western in 1879. Passenger service began on July 11, 1880 - six years to the day after the original land purchase - with a fare of 33¢ to Des Moines. By 1881 the whole town amounted to seven houses, a Methodist church, a depot, a combination store and post office, a livery stable, a blacksmith shop, a rooming house, a machine shop and a school. The Friday train brought the newspapers.
Ankeny incorporated as a town on February 28, 1903, covering a single square mile. Telephone service arrived that same year, electricity followed in 1907, and the all-volunteer fire department organized in 1907 with three ladders and 24 pails - equipment that would soon be tested. Between 1932 and 1940, four separate fires tore through the uptown business district. Most of the businesses rebuilt anyway.
Ground broke on July 31, 1941, for the Des Moines Ordnance Plant, a wartime ammunition factory on the north side of town. From 1942 to 1945 it ran around the clock, employing as many as 19,000 workers and turning out nearly 4 billion rounds of .30 and .50 caliber ammunition - up to 8 million bullets a day, shipped out to the war. When the war ended, the federal government deeded 590 acres of the site to Deere & Company in October 1947. Deere hired 570 workers and had its first Model 226 corn pickers rolling off the line by April 2, 1948. That plant, now John Deere Des Moines Works, still sprawls across 450 acres making sprayers, cotton pickers, tillage tools and grain drills for customers worldwide - and it's still one of Ankeny's largest employers.
Home mail delivery started in 1958. Ankeny was officially declared a city in 1961, with 2,964 residents - more than double the 1950 count. The town's first public swimming pool opened in 1968 after years of council debate. That same stretch of years brought Des Moines Area Community College: created March 18, 1966, as a vocational and technical center for the metro, DMACC held its first classes on the Ankeny campus in 1968 and moved into its newly built permanent building here in February 1969. Ankeny has been DMACC's flagship campus ever since.
Casey's General Stores has nothing to do with Ankeny's founding - Donald Lamberti opened the first store in Boone, Iowa, in 1968, naming the chain after his gasoline supplier and friend, Kurvin "Casey" Fish. The company went public in 1983. Then in 1990, Casey's moved its headquarters to Ankeny, where it's stayed ever since. Today it's one of only two Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Iowa - 2,950 stores across 19 states, run from SE Convenience Blvd.
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The 1,031 acres that became Prairie Trail - now home to The District, the sports complex, Kirkendall Public Library and thousands of new houses - was Iowa State University's Dairy Research Farm, purchased by ISU back in 1946. The Iowa Legislature approved selling the land in the early 2000s, the City of Ankeny made its offer in 2005, and developer Dennis Albaugh's D.R.A. Properties became master developer. The Ankeny City Council approved the master plan in 2006, built around new-urbanism principles: walkability, mixed uses, and a heavy focus on the natural streams already crossing the land.
The piers under the High Trestle Trail's famous bridge date to a 1970s Milwaukee Road rail bridge over the Des Moines River. When Union Pacific proposed retiring the corridor in 2003, the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation bought the 439-acre rail line in 2005. Trailhead sections in Ankeny and Woodward were built in 2007, another 20 miles opened in 2008, and the bridge itself - a half-mile, 13-story span, one of the largest trail bridges in the world, built with help from a $1.75M Vision Iowa grant - had its grand opening on April 30, 2011. It's been Ankeny's signature landmark ever since, and it's why the trail glows blue after dark.
A train depot stood on the site of today's Ankeny Market & Pavilion (the AMP) starting in 1912. After the fires of the 1930s and decades of slow decline, Uptown was, by most accounts, a tired commercial strip by 2010. Then the turnaround: the city sold an old fire station that became Firetrucker Brewery, aging city-owned buildings came down for new residential construction, and ground broke on the AMP itself in 2015. Property values in Uptown have more than doubled since 2010 - proof the old depot grounds still have some pull.
Ankeny's population has grown 169.9% since 2000 alone, and 2025 marked the town's sesquicentennial - 150 years since that first plat was recorded - with Ankeny Chamber SummerFest built around the milestone. From seven houses and a rail depot to a city of 80,809, the throughline hasn't really changed: a spot on the rail line (now the interstate) between two bigger places, worth stopping in for.
The Ankeny Area Historical Society Museum (301 SW 3rd St) is free and volunteer-run - a 1905 farmhouse, built by John Marts and moved to its current lot in August 1995 to save it from demolition, plus a barn built in 2005. Inside: a vintage kitchen, farm implements, military memorabilia, and Ordnance Plant history, alongside artifacts from Ankeny, Alleman, Bondurant, Carney, Elkhart, Enterprise, Polk City and Sheldahl.
Ankeny was founded in 1875 by John Fletcher Ankeny - a Des Moines doctor, businessman, and railroad promoter - along with his wife Sarah. They platted the town on 80 acres beside a new rail line, though the family never actually lived in the town named after them.
Ankeny was platted in 1875, so it is about 150 years old. It stayed a small farm-and-rail town for decades before booming in the second half of the 20th century.
The turning point came in 1947, when John Deere bought the former WWII ordnance plant and began manufacturing there. The jobs it brought helped grow Ankeny from under 3,000 people in 1960 to more than 80,000 today.
Ankeny was platted in 1875. John Fletcher Ankeny and his wife Sarah bought the 80-acre townsite on July 11, 1874, and recorded the plat on April 22, 1875. The town incorporated in 1903 and was officially declared a city in 1961.
John Fletcher Ankeny was the Des Moines businessman and railroad promoter who, with his wife Sarah, bought and platted the townsite in 1874 and 1875 and gave the town its name. The family never actually lived in Ankeny.
The first Casey's General Store opened in Boone, Iowa, in 1968, when Donald Lamberti converted a service station into a convenience store. Casey's later moved its headquarters to Ankeny in 1990.
Donald Lamberti founded Casey's, opening the first store in Boone, Iowa, in 1968 and naming the chain after his gasoline supplier and friend, Kurvin "Casey" Fish.
Yes. Casey's General Stores is one of only two Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Iowa, based in Ankeny (1 SE Convenience Blvd) since 1990. It runs about 2,950 stores across 19 states and is the third-largest convenience-store chain in the country.
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