Pocahontas: thriving in rural iowa
Town prepares to celebrate 150-plus years in 2021
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-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
Robbie Kudla, owner of Aspen Leaf Cafe and Coffee House in Pocahontas, holds up a fresh cup of Joe. The coffee shop opened up in October 2020.

-Messenger photo by Kelby Wingert
Robbie Kudla, owner of Aspen Leaf Cafe and Coffee House in Pocahontas, holds up a fresh cup of Joe. The coffee shop opened up in October 2020.
POCAHONTAS — The city of Pocahontas was all ready to celebrate the town’s sesquicentennial — its 150th anniversary — in 2020. Then the world was hit with a global pandemic.
Now, Pocahontas is preparing to celebrate that milestone — plus an extra year — this June, according to Mayor Richard Gruber.
“We’re looking forward to that,” he said.
With the celebration, Gruber also wants to highlight some of the Pocahontas businesses who have been around for 50 or more years.
“We have a fantastic grocery store in the community that’s Woods Grocery,” he said. “They just do a phenomenal job in keeping us in food supply and helping out around town.”
There’s also the Farm and Home Store that has been in business for the past five decades.
“We really depend on them,” the mayor said.
As a small, rural Iowa town, Gruber feels that Pocahontas is good at “holding our own.”
“I would point to a housing development here in town,” he said. “We have local developers that are continually building up here.”
The housing development on the east side of town, currently comprised of 22 single-family homes, has been selling lots quickly, the mayor said, adding that with further success, the development might expand even more.
“We have a business park out here too that is filling up and showing progress in that direction, so that has also been a positive thing for us,” he said.
Pocahontas is also in the process of updating one of its parks, Albert Park.
“We’re putting in some new play equipment — a fairly substantial cost — and trying to update bathrooms,” Gruber said.
The city also recently updated the cabin museum near the princess Pocahontas statue, he said.
The city is now near the tail end of a major effort to update its wastewater treatment plant.
“That’s been an ongoing project for the past two or three years,” Gruber said.
The project has also included going through and relining sewer lines throughout the town.
“You can’t skimp on the infrastructure or it will come back and bite you big time,” Gruber warned.
COVID-19 causing closures of various kinds over the past year hasn’t been all bad.
“We were able to repair our swimming pool this last year,” Gruber said. “With the pandemic, we didn’t open last summer, but that also afforded us the time to make some patchwork and have it repainted. We were losing a great deal of water so hopefully we’ve got that all fixed up.”
The city plans to open its newly renovated pool in the summer of 2021.