Dubuque, a city and the county-seat of Dubuque county, Iowa, U.S.A., on the Mississippi river, opposite the boundary line between Wisconsin and Illinois. Pop. (1890) 30,311; (1900) 36,297; (1905, state census) 41,941 (including 6835 foreign-born, the majority of whom were German and Irish); (1910 U.S. census) 38,494. Dubuque is served by the Illinois Central, the Chicago, Milwaukee & Saint Paul (which has repair shops here), the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, and the Chicago Great Western railways; it also has a considerable river traffic. The river is spanned here by a railway bridge and two wagon bridges. The business portion of the city lies on the low lands bordering the river; many of the residences are built on the slopes and summits of bluffs commanding extensive and picturesque views. Among the principal buildings are the Carnegie-Stout free public library (which in 1908 had 23,600 volumes, exclusive of the valuable Senator Allison collection of public documents), the public high school, and the house of the Dubuque Club. Dubuque is a Roman Catholic archiepiscopal see, and is the seat of St Joseph’s College (1873), a small Roman Catholic institution; of Wartburg Seminary (1854), a small Evangelical Lutheran theological school; of the German Presbyterian Theological School of the North-west (1852); of St Joseph’s Ladies’ Academy; and of Bayless Business College. Fifteen miles from Dubuque is a monastery of Trappist monks. Among the city’s charitable institutions are the Finley and the Mercy hospitals, a home for the friendless, a rescue home, a House of the Good Shepherd, and an insane asylum. In 1900 Dubuque ranked fourth and in 1905 fifth among the cities of the state as a manufacturing centre, the chief products being those of the planing mills and machine shops, and furniture, sashes and doors, liquors, carriages, wagons, coffins, clothing, boots and shoes, river steam boats, barges, torpedo boats, &c., and the value of the factory product being $9,279,414 in 1905 and $9,651,247 in 1900. The city lies in a region of lead and zinc mines, quantities of zinc ore in the form of black-jack being taken from the latter. Dubuque is important as a distributing centre for lumber, hardware, groceries and dry-goods.
As early as 1788 Julien Dubuque (1765-1810), attracted by the lead deposits in the vicinity, which were then being crudely worked by the Sauk and Fox Indians, settled here and carried on the mining industry until his death. In June 1829 miners from Galena, Illinois, attempted to make a settlement here in direct violation of Indian treaties, but were driven away by United States troops under orders from Colonel Zachary Taylor. Immediately after the Black Hawk War, white settlers began coming to the mines. Dubuque was laid out under an act of Congress approved on the 2nd of July 1836, and was incorporated in 1841.
