John T. Barrick located six miles south of Waverly in the spring of 1853 and laid out the town of Janesville, named for his wife, Jane. This was the first town laid out in the county and there the first newspaper was established in 1855, named the Bremer County Herald and published by Phineas V. Swan. The county was organized in 1853 and had at that time but eighty-two voters. The first officers were Jeremiah Ferris, county judge; Austin Ferris, sheriff; John Hunter, treasurer; and Herman A. Miles, clerk.
The first newspaper at Waverly was established on the 6th of March, 1856, by Herman A. Miles and was called the Waverly Republican. Richard Miles taught the first school in the county in 1853 in a log house in Jefferson township. Judge Thomas S. Wilson held the first term of court at Waverly in June, 1854.
BUCHANAN COUNTY is in the third tier west of the Mississippi River and in the third south of the Minnesota line; embraces an area of five hundred and seventy-six square miles and is divided into twenty congressional townships. It was established in December, 1837, and at that time contained all of that portion of the original county of Dubuque lying directly west from Delaware to the Missouri River. The county was named for James Buchanan, afterwards President of the United States. The name was suggested by S. P. Stoughton a prominent Democrat of the new county. In 1843 the territory was reduced to its present limits.
The first white man known to have settled in the county was William Bennett who with his family came from Delaware County in February, 1842, took a claim and built a log cabin on the east bank of the Wapsipinicon River where Quasqueton was afterwards laid out. Soon after S. G. and S. H. Sanford and Ezra Allen took claims in the same vicinity. Early in the spring Dr. Edward
