Albia Iowa Historical Information

Albia Iowa has a rich and full history, part of which will be displayed for you in the Historical Museum of the area.

Albia was originally named Princeton,and was at one time, a center for the coal mining industry.

Monroe county is nearly entirely underlaid by a layer of coal that will vary in depths from a mere 3 or 4 inches, to as much as two feet.

Farmers in the area found small deposits of the coal which they stripped out of the earth by the wagon load and sold to the people of the small farming community for heat.

Organized companies came into the area and found they could produce as much as 500 tons of coal on a daily basis, with about 600 area men working in the coal mines at any given time.

At one point, coal mines covered over 450 acres of the land surrounding Albia Iowa, about three miles west of the settlement.

Mules drew the coal cars out of the mines and to the trains that carried the coal to market.

(Harper's Weekly, February 22, 1873)

Today the mines are no longer running full bore in Albia, but the area does still supply some coal to the ever running coal trains through the area.