The following article is the property of The Iowa Almanac and was posted with permission from the author, Professor Jeff Stein.
It was a quarter after five in the afternoon on May 2nd, 1890, when residents of Winnebago County saw something quite remarkable.
Witnesses heard a roaring sound, and looked into the western sky to find an object with a head compared to the size of a full moon, sputtering and throwing off a long train of sparks, with a trail of heavy black smoke creating a line in the sky. It looked like a great fireball, which for a moment eclipsed the sunlight of what was an almost cloudless sky that day.
It was a meteorite shower, which wound up being seen across the state...but fragments showered down on an eight-mile area of the county after the meteorite exploded about 11 miles northwest of Forest City, next to the town of Thompson.
The Forest City Meteorite, as it quickly was called, rained 269 pounds of fragments onto the ground, with the largest piece weighing 81 pounds alone. For many miles, the noise sounded like heavy cannonading, along with a hissing and a tremor that brought people from their houses, to find out what was going on.
People picked up fragments right away, and geologists traveled to the area to get samples. One from Minnesota offered top dollar for fragments, which led Peter Hoagland to sell a particularly large piece to a geologist, after a bidding war. But a legal battle ensued, since Hoagland sold a fragment which had landed on his neighbor's property. The case went all the way to the Iowa Supreme Court...the stone stayed at the University of Minnesota, and Hoagland had to give back the money.
Witnesses throughout northwest Iowa--near Mason City, Fort Dodge, Sioux City--and even into South Dakota said they saw and heard it, which was unique because of the time of day and weather conditions, when the Forest City Meteorite fell to the ground and shook Winnebago County, on this date in 1890.
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