Austin Adams - Dubuque, Iowa

Dubuque, Iowa

When Adams decided to move west, his friends believed that it wouldn't suit him and that he would return early. Despite this, he settled in Dubuque, Iowa in July 1854. "The evening he reached Dubuque he felt that here was to be his life's work." He resided in Dubuque for the rest of his life. Later in life, he said: "I wanted more liberty, a society with more variety than I had ever seen in the East."

After arriving in Dubuque, he began to practice law there.

Like many at the time, he was drawn to seemingly-profitable real-estate investments, and he suffered when their value dropped in the Panic of 1857. He was so affected by this loss that when he was seventy and a friend offered him a share in a promising real-estate investment, he declined, saying "No, I have already had all the profits of real-estate transactions I can afford."

Adams was instrumental in promoting education in Dubuque; he opened an academy, one of the first institutes of secondary education in Dubuque, and taught with Mary Mann, wife of Horace Mann, for six months. During the winter of 1854 he proposed building a public library; he raised funds for it with a series of lectures and solicited donations of books from private libraries.

He actively supported John C. Frémont's campaign for president in 1856. While he didn't naturally like politics, he was strongly committed to early Republican principles.

He helped to organize a Young Men's Christian Association in Dubuque in 1857. For three years he had a Bible class, while a member and a trustee of the Congregational church, and for two years in the Universalist church. One year he had evenings devoted to the study of physical science in the Young Men's Christian Association. He had the subject of geology, and "unrolled the gospel of the storied world to the youth gathered there."

In 1858, after listening to the Lincoln-Douglas debates in Galena, Illinois, he said of Lincoln:

During the American Civil War in 1864, he was secretary of the Sanitary Fair for three months to raise funds for the hospital.

In December 1865, he and ten other gentlemen formed a literary club called "The Round Table". They obtained a room and furnished it with a round table that could fit fifteen people around it. Wendell Phillips and Ralph Waldo Emerson visited it while they were in Dubuque. They were impressed, and later told their friends in Boston about their "find in the West."

Adams was a regent of Iowa State University (ISU) and a trustee of Humboldt College for several years. He was Law Lecturer at the University of Iowa College of Law from 1875 until his death.