Clarinda is a city in and the county seat of Page County, Iowa, United States. It is located in Nodaway Township. The population was 5,369 at the time of the 2020 census.
History
Clarinda was founded in 1851, and incorporated on December 8, 1866. Many stories are told of such notables as Jesse James frequently passing through.
The town is named for Clarinda Buck, who according to legend carried water to the surveyors while Page County was first being surveyed.
The best known national firm in Clarinda for many decades was Berry's Seed Company, a mail order farm seed distribution business founded in 1885 at Clarinda by A. A. Berry. Berry's Seed Company diversified into retail stores in the 1950s, but the stores were sold off over the following decade, and today the company, known as Berry's Garden Center, operates from its one remaining retail outlet in Danville, Illinois.
In 1943, during World War II, an internment camp designed for 3,000 prisoners of war with sixty barracks and a 150-bed hospital was built in Clarinda. German prisoners were the first to arrive at Camp Clarinda, followed in 1945 by Italian and Japanese POWs.
The southeast area of Clarinda was once dubbed "Gun Town" and remains known by that name today. A noted author wrote, "In the twenties and thirties, Clarinda seemed to be two separate towns: Guntown and Uptown. In the middle of the square was, and remains, the courthouse. The four blocks surrounding the square are filled with businesses. Guntown was a town all its own. The 700 block of East Garfield was a solid block of businesses--grocery stores, barber, a Chinese restaurant, another restaurant on a corner, a rug factory, a large grocery, the Swifts packing plant, and railroad tracks with freight depot and roundhouse to turn trains around."
Transportation
Road Network
Clarinda is located on US Highway 71 and Iowa Highway 2. In the past, both of these highways came through the center of town, but there is now a bypass that takes both highways to the south and east of Clarinda proper. There is also a good network of “farm to market” or county roads servicing the area.
Railroad Service
Early in its history, Clarinda was served by railroads from seven different directions - 5 of which were predecessors to the Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroad (CB&Q). The short westbound leg of track connecting Clarinda to Shenandoah was torn up in 1936 due to a washout of the track. In 1946, service was lost on the eastbound leg to Humeston and the line southwest to Tarkio, Missouri, through Coin, Iowa. Service was maintained south of Clarinda until the 1950s and was then trimmed back to a branch serving Clarinda from the main line to the north at Villisca, Iowa. This line survived a merger into the Burlington Northern but was abandoned in the 1980s. The beautiful brick depot in Clarinda still survives and is now the Student Union of the Iowa Western Community College-Clarinda campus.
There were two additional shortline railroads that ran to Clarinda. One was the Iowa & Southwestern which connected Clarinda southwest through College Springs to the Iowa-Missouri border town of Blanchard. The I&SW had its own depot very close to the Clarinda CB&Q Depot. It was abandoned before 1914. The second route was the Clarinda and St. Louis Railroad which ran south out of Clarinda roughly paralleling the CB&Q line to the east and terminating in Rosenberry, Missouri. This line joined with the Wabash Railroad just a few miles east of the CB&Q line also from Clarinda interchanged with the Wabash in the town of Burlington Junction, Missouri. The Clarinda and St. Louis Railroad was abandoned in the 1899 after only a few years of operation.
Clarinda now joins a growing list of county seats in Iowa without rail service.[12]
Air Service
Camp Clarinda was located by what today is the town's municipal airport, Schenck Field (named for aviator/farmer Ray Schenck, who built the original Clarinda Airport on the location).
Geography
Clarinda is located along the West Nodaway River, just north of its confluence with the East Nodaway River.
According to the United States Census Bureau, the city has a total area of , of which is land and is water.