Herbert Quick was born on October 23, 1861, on a farm in Shiloh Township in Grundy County near the Hardin County line. He was called Herbie and had a polio as I boy. The disease didn’t prevent him from doing farm work, but it did deny him an appointment he wanted to West Point. The Quick family moved three times as farm tenants before buying in 1869 an 80-acre place less than a mile east of Colfax No. 9 school – the school house now in Orion Park since 1933. Quick completed his country school education at Colfax No. 9 but never taught there. Inside the school house, however, you can see Quick’s desk as a teacher. You can also ring the school bell he used to call students inside for classes.

 Quick was a true son of the prairie. In Quick’s own words: “The Widow Fuller Place [Near the boundaries of Hardin and Grundy counties, where the Quicks were tenant farmers in the 1860s] was on the prairie, and it was here that I became a prairie boy, to grow up on the prairie, live with it in all its moods, struggle with its storms, watch the plow destroy it, see its groves of trees burgeon until it looked almost like a strange sort of woodland, count the new farms as they came into being as by some sort of magic, see winding trails plowed up and give place to straight roads along section lines, hear the whistle of the railway engine come closer and closer until every county-seat in Iowa was a railway station, and finally to lose entirely the old prairie which we feared, loved and conquered.”