Dressed in their Sunday best, this depression-era Sunday School group posed on the steps of the Youngstown School

Youngstown even fielded a baseball team from around the 1920's into the 1940's. Vic Peterson was pitcher at one time, but he can not recall a team name. Ira Daniel's also played on the team, which apparently was very successful playing teams from other small towns.

Youngstown Yikes Play Ball

In the 1950's, a softball team--The Youngstown Yikes-- was organized. Games were played on a diamond south of the cemetery, where a trailer park is located today.

Of course, some memories of the period are of the hardships and tragedies. Four Mile Creek flooded frequently, with floods of 1918, 1944, and 1947 standing out. The nearby Economy Coal Mine, one of the last in the area, was destroyed by fire in the early 1940's. Cliff Caldwell recalls when the home of Bernie Starck burned down

in the 1930's. Some young men were lost in the world wars, including Raymond Pierick, the first man in the district killed in World War II. (A flag pole in front of the school was dedicated to Pierick, a fact noted on a plaque nearby. The whereabouts of the plaque now is not known.) In one of the few crimes in the area, a member of the prominent Murrow family, Charlie Murrow, died of a gunshot wound early in the century, but no one was ever convicted in his death.

Forces that would eventually lead to a second boom for the area were also quietly at work in the first half of the century. Most importantly, in 1923 Iowa Power and Light Company bought land along the Des Moines River to build Power Generating Plant No. 2. That plant became operational in 1926.

Some Des Moines people also moved into the area, the first trickle of a later flow. One who came was Charles P. Hurd. Hurd had spent 40

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