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Davenport was founded in 1836 by Antoine Le Claire on the west bank of the Mississippi River, and the Rock Island Railroad bridge built here in 1856 was the first to cross the great river. A steamboat owner tried to have the bridge demolished, and the ensuing lawsuit brought a young Illinois lawyer named Abraham Lincoln to Davenport to argue the railroad's case. Lincoln won, the bridge stayed, and the commercial logic of crossing the Mississippi rather than going around it transformed the Midwest. The old downtown district still faces the river with the confidence of a city that believes it ended up on the right side of history.

In 1895, a magnetic healer named Daniel David Palmer manipulated the spine of a partially deaf janitor in a building on Brady Street and later claimed it restored the man's hearing.

Palmer's Infirmary eventually became Palmer College of Chiropractic, which still occupies a campus in downtown Davenport and calls itself the Fountainhead of chiropractic. Whether or not you find the origin story convincing, the college's history museum on Brady Street is a genuinely peculiar window into alternative medicine's American roots.