Page:History of Iowa From the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century Volume 3.djvu/367

 Constitution, omitted the act from the code and it ceased to have effect after the 1st of September, of that year.

The Third General Assembly, in 1850, created twenty-five new counties embracing all of the territory in which counties had not been established heretofore.

A bill providing for the creation of these counties was prepared by P. M. Cassady, Senator from the Polk County district, and was referred to the committee on new counties of which Mr. Casady was a member. *   In the original bill the county now bearing the name of Union was named “Mason,” for Judge Charles Mason. The committee was opposed to discriminating among the many living men of note in the State and changed the name to Union. Objection was also made to the name of Buncombe but when it was explained that it was in honor of a distinguished officer in the Revolutionary War from North Carolina, it was permitted to remain. The bill also gave the name of Floyd to the one which is now Woodbury, to commemorate Sergeant Floyd of the Lewis and Clark expedition. The House amended the bill by naming that county “Wahkaw.” The committee fixed upon a large number of the names in the following manner:  three were named in honor of colonels who fell in the War with Mexico—Hardin of Illinois, Clay of Kentucky and Yell of Arkansas. Three more were named for battle-fields in the same war—Cerro Gordo, Buena Vista and Palo Alto. Three for Irish patriots—Emmet, Mitchell and O’Brien. One county was named Worth, for Major-General William J. Worth; one for General William O. Butler who was the Democratic candidate for Vice-President in 1848; one for Major Frederick Mills, a talented young lawyer from Burlington who was killed at the Battle of Cherubusco; one for Edwin Guthrie, an early pioneer of Fort Madison, who died of wounds received in battle in Mexico. The Mexican War had closed but two years before this

* Many of the facts in relation to the naming of these counties were first given to the public in a paper read by Judge Casady in 1894, at a session of the Pioneer Lawmakers’ Association.