Markets were a long way off, Dubuque and Muscatine being the principal places where they sold their produce. It took four days to take a load to Dubuque and bring one back. They never made the trip with empty wagons. There were no bridges. The roads ran across the virgin prairie, and often, when sloughs were bad, they had to take off part of the load, drive through a bad place, unload what they had hauled over and return for the rest, thus delaying their journey.
Finally the Northwestern road came to Cedar Rapids in 1859, and later a road to Marion and Springville, bringing, as they felt, markets to their very doors.
They turned the virgin soil, sowed, reaped, mowed, and garnered the fruits of their labor year after year, early and late alike, working with the primitive tools of that day when most of the work was done by main strength instead of machinery. They formed from necessity those habits of saving every thing which, with many, later resulted in an abundance for the rainy day. These early privations, sturdy devotion to the work, with a fidelity well worth emulation has brought its rewards in one of the richest agricultural regions on earth.
They saw the steady advancement of material things as a reward for their patient toil. They established schools and churches, overcoming as rapidly as possible the drawbacks and inconveniences of pioneer life.
They made the way of the transgressor a hard one, and when law breakers and horse thieves escaped through some sharp practice, they took the law in their own hands and rid the country for all time of the horse thief and general law breaker, thereby putting a premium on honesty.
The villages of Waubeek and Central City were established in the usual way. Blacksmith shops, stores, and post offices being a necessity, they were established on the banks of the Wapsie river, Central City on the north side of the river just at the north line of the township, and Waubeek five miles southeast on the south bank of the river.
Some dams were built across the river at both places and saw mills established to saw lumber for the pioneer houses to displace the log cabin. These were followed by grist mills to make flour for the settlers, and for many years the mills at both places were run at their full capacity. Gradually wheat was abandoned as a product, and the people were able to buy a better grade of flour than the home mills could make. They were allowed to run down and were neglected until finally the mill at Waubeek was allowed to fall in the river. The last vestige of its site is gone.
The mill at Central City has run until lately, grinding the feed for the farmers, but it, too, has quit, the wheel is still, and the busy scenes about its doors are but memories of its great convenience and usefulness to those it served so well.
After years of quiet and peaceful pursuits the mutterings of civil war began to be heard. The lowering clouds portending the storm made the heart of many a pioneer mother beat with anxiety as she felt that if it came she must lay a son on the altar.
Finally when the storm burst on the community Maine township was not backward in sending its quota of men, something like twenty of its best sons enlisting in the Twentieth Iowa, and others in the Sixteenth, the Twenty-fourth, and other scattered regiments.