Historic General Dodge House

Grenville Dodge rose to prominence first as a Union general in the Civil War, where he directed the building and repair of railroads and bridges that kept armies supplied, and ran an intelligence network as well. That wartime experience made him one of the country's foremost railroad engineers, and after the war he became chief engineer of the Union Pacific, the company charged with building west from the Missouri River.

Council Bluffs and Omaha, facing each other across the river, became the eastern anchor of the transcontinental railroad, and Dodge's work helped drive the rails across the plains and mountains until they met the line building east from California. His life spanned soldiering, surveying, business, and politics, and his fingerprints are on the map of the American West.

In the late 1860s Dodge built a large and elegant home on a bluff in Council Bluffs, a fashionable Victorian mansion that reflected his wealth and standing. Built with fine materials and up-to-date conveniences for its day, it was a showplace, and it hosted the family and their many notable guests over the years.

By the mid-1900s the house faced possible demolition, as so many grand old homes did, but a preservation effort saved it and restored it to its Gilded Age appearance. Today it is furnished with period pieces and shown by guided tour, giving visitors a vivid picture of upper-class life in the railroad era and of the family that lived there.

Council Bluffs sits on the east bank of the Missouri River, and its position made it a natural gateway for people and goods heading west. Emigrants on the overland trails, Mormon travelers on their way to Utah, and later the railroads all passed through or launched from here. The city's very name recalls a council held nearby between explorers Lewis and Clark and Native leaders.

The Dodge House is one of several historic sites that recall this heritage, alongside museums devoted to the railroads that made the city a hub. Together they tell the story of a place that, for a time, stood at the very edge of the settled country, the last stop before the long journey into the West.

The Missouri River valley here lies within the historic homelands of the Ioway, for whom the state is named, and other peoples of the region, whose communities lived and traded along the great river long before the trails and railroads came. The council that gave Council Bluffs its name was one moment in a long history of Native presence on this stretch of the Missouri.

The river shaped everything about the place, from the trails that followed it to the railroads that had to cross it. The wide, muddy Missouri and the bluffs that rise above it, one of which the Dodge mansion crowns, remain the defining features of a region that served as a doorway between the settled East and the open West.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.