How the story of Buxton, Iowa helped this nomadic author find a home

Editor’s Note: Rachelle Chase first told this story onstage at the Des Moines Storytellers Project: My First Time event in 2019. The Des Moines Storytellers Project, a series of storytelling events in which community members collaborated with Register journalists to tell true, first-person stories live on stage, held its series finale in October. This week it celebrates its seven-season run by sharing past stories.

Buxton, Iowa is the first place I ever really got to know. The irony is that I never lived there and it no longer exists. But it was one of the most amazing and unique cities in the country.

Buxton was a coal mining town founded in 1900 by the Consolidation Coal Company. The town itself was different from other coal mining towns with its more than 40 local businesses, its eleven churches, three parks, a golf course, baseball games, band performances, movie theaters every night and even bocce ball. The list goes on.

But it was the people themselves that made the city even more amazing. The year 1900 was a time of extreme racism, violence, and unequal treatment and rights for African Americans. And yet in Buxton, this town of 5,000 in a state that is 99.3 percent white or foreign-born, African Americans made up 40 to 55 percent of the population for much of its existence.

And African Americans were not only tolerated there, they were treated as equals to whites. There was no separation. The men traveled to the mines on the same trains and worked in neighboring rooms. Black and white families lived next door to each other. Black and white residents worked and shopped at the company store. Black and white teachers taught black and white students in the same classrooms. Children of both races played together and swam together.

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African Americans not only lived there, they thrived and were leaders in the community. They owned hotels and restaurants. They were landowners, doctors, lawyers, teachers, police officers, postmasters and more. Black men ran the $20,000 YMCA, which was built for them but used by both races.

I could talk about Buxton for hours – and I actually have.

I have researched and written about Buxton on and off for 10 years and have now written two books about it. I got to know the ghost town of Buxton better than any other town I’ve ever lived in. I have gotten to know the dead people of Buxton better than the living people of any town I have ever lived in. That is because I have never done it lived in every city I’ve lived in. I have always been a nomad, a visitor passing through.

When I was growing up, moving from place to place was a way of life. My father was in sales and my mother loved trying new places. So by the time I graduated high school, I had already attended 14 different schools. This moving beetle followed me into adulthood.

After more than 12 different addresses, I gave up choosing one in 2000. I sold my house, put my stuff in storage, packed my SUV and drove across the country to see parts of the US I had never seen before. Every three months I would log onto Craigslist, select the next rental, and move on. I chose Fripp Island, South Carolina because I heard that part of Forrest Gump was filmed there. I chose the historic district of Savannah, Georgia because I had never been to the South. Then Atlanta, because every black person in the north seemed to be migrating to this new black mecca. I landed in Vermont just in time to capture the fall foliage.

It was there, sitting in stunned horror on the couch of a rented apartment, my eyes full of tears, that I made the decision that would lead me to Buxton. It was September 11, 2001 – the day I was supposed to be on Wall Street for a job interview, but instead watched planes hit the Twin Towers, just blocks from where I was supposed to be.

My desire to travel was replaced by a desire to see my family. Since I would be traveling through Iowa, my online romance teacher invited me to visit her in Ottumwa.

My teacher was Leigh Michaels, bestselling author of 80 Harlequin romances, some of which I was surprised to discover I had read in college. Although I was somewhat impressed with Leigh, we began a long friendship that saw us speak on the phone every Saturday morning for 14 years.

On one of my first visits to Iowa in 2008, Leigh and her husband took me to the remains of Buxton. Property owner Jim Keegel led us through the cornfields to the site. As I closed my eyes and listened to Jim’s descriptions of what was there, instead of the foundations of the company store, I saw the two-story building and black and white customers drinking and shopping at the soda fountain. Instead of the brick vault surrounded by bushes and trees, I saw the cash register where black and white men had lined up to receive their wages.

I just couldn’t believe that there was a city in the middle of nowhere during the era of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan – one that was supposedly the largest unincorporated city in the country.

Was it really the utopia it seemed?

I couldn’t get Buxton out of my head. When my third romance novel was published, I traveled to Iowa and researched Buxton. After my fourth romance novel was published, I traveled to Iowa and researched Buxton. I listened to tape after tape of former residents talking about life in this city.

It wasn’t until 2014 that I knew what I was going to do with this research. I wanted to move to Ottumwa and write a book. “Lost Buxton” was published in 2017, followed by “Creating the Black Utopia of Buxton, Iowa” in 2019, followed by short articles about Buxton on LostBuxton.com.

But the strangest thing happened when I moved to Iowa and researched Buxton. Iowa was where I first started living in one place. I began to get to know Iowa and the people who lived there – people who were still alive. And the strangest experiences began to happen.

Like my first visit to New Pioneer Food Co-op in Iowa City. I drove 1.5 hours to stock up on organic produce and free-range chicken and salmon from Norway. (Remember: I’m from San Francisco). I was chatting with the clerk about how far I had driven to shop there, how much I liked the store, and how new I was to Iowa when he told me the total: $456. I gave him my debit card.

Rejected.

I gave him my Visa credit card.

Rejected.

I was embarrassed and really wanted to leave, but he called the manager.

The manager, Shane – I’ll never forget his name – studied my receipt and noticed that I had traveled a long way to shop. He then asked me if I still had a credit card at home and said, “Take your groceries with you and call me with the credit card when you get home.”

Who lets a stranger walk out of the store with almost $500 worth of groceries? (And for the record, the cards were declined for fraud protection reasons, which I clarified and paid for before I left.)

Bizarre acts of kindness continued.

My friend Dan came to visit me. Proud that my new home was the future birthplace of Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk, I brought him to Riverside. We stopped at Casey’s to get directions to the museum before being told the museum was closed. I was amazed. Dan, a Trekkie, had come all the way from San Francisco. The man behind me spoke up and said, “I’m on the board and I happen to have a key to the museum.” So he let us in and he and Dan had a lively conversation about Star Trek while I beamed with pride.

Then there were my book events. Instead of people coming up to me and asking me where the bathroom is or where the latest Harry Potter book is, like they did when I sat behind a stack of my romance books, people actually came to the bookstore to Seeing me say they couldn’t wait to read my book and I felt like JK Rowling.

I have given more than 60 talks about Buxton throughout Iowa, and many of them were standing room only, only a handful of people fell asleep, and the majority were as interested, excited, and proud as I was that such a town existed in Iowa.

Although Buxton was the first city I ever experienced, it gave me a greater appreciation for Iowa

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How the story of Buxton, Iowa helped this nomadic author find a home

ByAmelia Journalton

By Amelia Journalton

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