Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Amund, Iowa


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was keep. ✗ plicit  03:25, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Amund, Iowa

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This is yet another spot copied into GNIS from the 1906 Iowa Geological Survey, and which also happened to be the location of a rural post office. After that, things become rocky. The topos don't go far back, and they don't acknowledge one of the two farms at the crossroads, even though it goes back into the 1930s at least. There might have been a third farm, though it's more likely part of the second, on the other side of the road. Anyway, searching gets hits that suggest a creamery, and for a hunting club, for the Farmers' Co-operative Telephone Company (organized there), and for shorthorn cattle and Duroc-Jersey swine. Does this add up to a town? At this point my answer would be no. It comes across as more of locale. A narrative of it as a town is conspicuously lacking. Mangoe (talk) 03:06, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Geography-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 08:44, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Note: This discussion has been included in the list of Iowa-related deletion discussions. Shellwood (talk) 08:44, 25 May 2021 (UTC)


 * It's not even in Polk's Iowa state Gazetteer. Nor is it in the 1917, although people named Amund are.  The sum total of all of the information that I can find is: "Amund: A hamlet and post office (1888-1907) in the northwest corner of section 22, Eden Township." So yes, it is documented as a hamlet in one source, 7 decades later, but doesn't turn up in contemporary gazetteers or histories.  Everything else has just the post office, in post office directories and as "one mile west of Amund post office".  No, I cannot in all honesty claim  as a reliable source. Uncle G (talk) 12:24, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep - User:Uncle G certainly seems to have established notability.
 * The History of Winnebago County and Hancock County, Iowa, appears a reliable historic source, and supports that this was a hamlet. This is corroborated by Abandoned Towns, Villages and Post Offices of Iowa (1930), which also calls Amund a "hamlet", and furthermore differentiates a hamlet from a place that just has a post office.
 * Uncle G also cites this genealogy board, but dismisses Wally Rutter as an unreliable source. All we're trying to do here is establish that this place had people living there at one time, and because this isn't some garage band trying to get its article onto Wikipedia, I'm pretty sure Wally isn't spamming the Norway Heritage Community genealogy board when he writes (in that same source), "Amund Iowa was a tiny hamlet, so to speak, in 1901 or so. It was just 2 miles south of the Minnesota, Iowa line. That would put it in easy walking distance of Emmons, Minnesota. My grandmother and him lived in a house north east of Amund."
 * Here is an obituary published in 2009 in the Globe Gazette from Mason City, Iowa, for Darlyne Geneva Engebretson (82), who "was born on November 10, 1926, to Benjamin and Jeanette (Aske) Johnson in Amund, Iowa."
 * This list of Iowans who served during WWI from North Dakota mentions "Larson, Gilman Julius. Marine #none; registrant, Stutsman county; born in Amund, Iowa, Feb 18, 1894".
 * Amund also appeared on a 1911 Iowa map by Rand McNally, which suggests it was more than just a post office. Magnolia677 (talk) 15:47, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
 * No, the History does not support this, and I never said that it did. If you assert otherwise, I challenge you to give the page of the History on which this is named as a hamlet, rather than given as a person's name.  (Hint: "Amund" only occurs in volume 2, which is the biographies.  Eden Township is page 113 of volume 1, and has no Amund.) Moreover, I'm just putting Verifiability into practice, as you should but are not.  Why on Earth is someone named "Wally" on a discussion forum on a WWW site a reliable source?  Who is that person?  What are xyr credentials?  Do you even know?  The Rand-McNally map is laughable, as it literally isn't even a dot on that map.  Compare with the other named places; there's no actual equivalent hollow dot symbol next to Amund, and that isn't telling you what it is.  This exhibits the very let's-just-assume-what-the-dot-on-the-map-is problem that underpins the whole GNIS mess.  Lastly, things saying "in Amund" don't actually tell us what it is either.  It could be a farm for all that that says.  (And indeed Mangoe observes two oblique hints in sources that it was a farm.) The best that you've got is Mott, which is word-for-word the same as the Hawkeye Heritage but still decades after the fact.  Polk's (which actually has a 1908 edition, but lists "discontinued" post offices in its 1918 edition), Lippincott's, and others are good for post offices, as well as post-hamlets, post-villages, and suchlike.  (Hair's Iowa State Gazetteer is from 1865, so isn't to be expected to have something from 1888, and indeed it has not.  For the same reason, it isn't to be expected in the 1886 Union Publishing History of Kossuth, Hancock, and Winnebago counties, Iowa.) But Amund does not appear in any of the actually contemporary gazetteers that I've been scouring to find all of these places.  It doesn't come up in any of the history books on Norwegian settlement in Iowa.  It's only in things like the 1909 United States Official Postal Guide, ironically listed in the section "POST OFFICES DISCONTINUED ON ACCOUNT OF RURAL DELIVERY" on page 702. Then you've got the problem that after all this all that we've got is "X was a hamlet" or "X was a post office" with no actual in-depth documentation, which directory listings and map dots are not.  All of this effort only gets one over the "unincorporated community" hurdle of identifying the actual subject and getting past the GNIS rubbish, and doesn't demonstrate actual documentation in depth of geology, history, politics, demographics, &c. that notability needs. Uncle G (talk) 18:13, 25 May 2021 (UTC)


 * A couple short paragraphs here stating that this was a short small community founded in 1892 that dissolved in 1906 because the railroad wasn't close enough to serve as a shipping point. Agree with  above that the genealogy board doesn't count as RS, and the maps aren't going to be particularly useful for determining notability.  Leaning merge to the township article based on the newspaper clipping I found devoting a couple paragraphs to this referring to it as a minor settlement and providing verification, but I don't think there's enough to support a stand-alone article here.  My minimum is generally three in-depth sources, or two if both are really good. Here we've got one, and it's not that long. Hog Farm Talk 21:03, 25 May 2021 (UTC)
 * switching to Keep - one of Milowent's sources is the same thing as the link I found above, and the one added about the P.O. closing is fairly trivial IMO, but between two others added by Milowent and the one identified by both me and them, I think this is keepable. Hog Farm Talk 19:39, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep: I added some more sources and content about good old Amund.--Milowent • hasspoken  17:03, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Keep, per Milowent's improvements (which establish notability) and the articles which specifically mention Amund being a town, rather than just a post office. Notability is not temporary. Firsfron of Ronchester  22:39, 26 May 2021 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.