Events and Activities : Center Point Historical Society hosts Prohibition Program May 2

A Toast to Prohibition at the Center Point Public Library: Linda McCann to speak May 2

In 1920s Iowa, your respectable next-door neighbor may have been a bootlegger or your salt-of-the-earth farmer friend may have been selling his corn crop to one.

On Monday, May 2, Eastern Iowa author Linda Betsinger McCann will lift the lid and give us a peek at what was cooking around here during Prohibition. The free program at 7 p.m. at the Center Point Library Community Room is sponsored by the Center Point Historical Society and Friends of the Center Point Library.

The 18th Amendment made Prohibition the national law in 1920, but Iowa had "gone dry" some years prior. Prohibition was repealed in 1933 in response to the Great Depression, the rise of organized crime, and public non-compliance.

One of the first suspected Prohibition gangster murders was of a Vinton woman, Linda says, and the case has never been solved.

Linda's 2014 "Prohibition in Eastern Iowa" and some of her other Eastern Iowa history books will be available for sale and signing at the event. The Linn County Conservation/Center Point Historical Society Depot Museum was in one of her first books, "The Cedar Valley Road."