Basic Information
- Type of Place
- Independent City or Town
- Metro Area
- Politics c. 1860?
- Unions, Organized Labor?
Sundown Town Status
- Sundown Town in the Past?
- Probable
- Was there an ordinance?
- Don't Know
- Sign?
- Don’t Know
- Year of Greatest Interest
- Still Sundown?
- Probably
Census Information
| Total | White | Black | Asian | Native | Hispanic | Other | BHshld | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1860 | ||||||||
| 1870 | ||||||||
| 1880 | ||||||||
| 1890 | ||||||||
| 1900 | ||||||||
| 1910 | ||||||||
| 1920 | ||||||||
| 1930 | ||||||||
| 1940 | ||||||||
| 1950 | ||||||||
| 1960 | ||||||||
| 1970 | ||||||||
| 1980 | ||||||||
| 1990 | 1,332 | 1,330 | 0 | 1 | 0 | |||
| 2000 | ||||||||
| 2010 | ||||||||
| 2020 |
Method of Exclusion
- Unknown
Main Ethnic Group(s)
- Unknown
Group(s) Excluded
- Black
Comments
“I lived in Villisca for five years (1998 2003) and
taught social studies at the high school. Villisca is
almost all white, and the only students of color were
foster children who lived with a family outside of
Nodaway. (Nodaway is a smaller town to the east of
Villisca that has been subsumed into the Villisca
School District.)
“…Several times in the course of those five years, I had
students inform me that Villisca had a city ordinance
that did not allow African Americans to remain within
city limits after sundown. A community member, at
some point, clarified that this wasn’t a written
ordinance that was currently on the books, but it
could have been in the past. The most commonly held
conception, however, was that this was an ordinance
that still existed.”
-posted to the web, 2006
Villisca’s ordinance may stem from the 1912 murders
of 8 white people, the largest mass murder in Iowa
history. Newspaper reports from the time blamed the
crime on a black vagrant or vagrants passing through
town.