The Collins post office opened in 1881, the earliest record of the town by name. Another post office, Collins Centre (1879), opened inside today’s city and later closed.
First census: 540 in 19002020 census: 495145 years
Founding year: the first Collins post office (Blevins & Helbock, CC0).
What stands out about Collins’ past
Read from the archive, the National Register and the record. The page puts what stands out first.
Wikipedia doesn’t have a history of Collins yet. The photos, dates and memories neighbors add here are how it gets written.
Collins is a city in Story County, Iowa, United States. The population was 495 at the 2020 census. It is part of the Ames, Iowa Metropolitan Statistical Area, which is a part of the larger Ames-Boone, Iowa Combined Statistical Area.
Its first post office opened in 1881. Its population held steady between the last two censuses: 495 in 2010, 495 in 2020.
Intro from Wikipedia. Population: U.S. Census Bureau.
From the old history books
What they wrote about Collins in 1911
Passages that mention Collins, cut from the printed page as they were published.
of the catalog mail-order houses and what trade there was in the country, Baldwin & :Maxwell very largely commanded. The firm had its headquarters and main business at Iowa Center with important branches at Cambridge, Clyde — a little over the line from Collins township into Jasper county — and Colo, the latter place being the one for railroad shipments. With such business interests at Iowa Center, and with no railroad south of about the middle of the county, excepting the narrow gauge in the extreme southwest, Iowa Center ranked distinctly next to Nevada and y\mes
Text read by machine from the scan; it may contain errors.
were Iowa Center and Cambridge, and east of the southern part of Story County was Edenville. The road hit Edenville and called it Rhodes. It also hit Cambridge, but it missed Iowa Center, and its construction was followed by the location of Collins, Maxwell and Huxley and also Elwell, which never got so good a start as the other towns named. While the railroad management did not ask for subsidies, it was interested in town 418
Text read by machine from the scan; it may contain errors.
Scans and text from the Internet Archive. Books published in 1930 or earlier, which are in the public domain.
Timeline
Collins, 1879 to 1975
Woven from the archive, old maps, post office records, the National Register and the people born here.
Nothing in the archives for these yearsWeddings on Main Street, storms, parades, school pictures, the old store. If it’s in your family album, it belongs here.
Founding dates: Wikidata, Wikipedia, the U.S. post office records of Blevins & Helbock (CC0) and the Census. Homes by year built: Census ACS 2020–24. National Register of Historic Places: National Park Service (list of May 22, 2026). Old photos, postcards and papers: Wikimedia Commons, the Library of Congress and other public archives, credited on each item’s page. Maps: U.S. Geological Survey historical topographic maps (via Esri) and Sanborn fire-insurance maps (Library of Congress). History text and census tables: Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0). Places that used to be: USGS Geographic Names Information System (2021). How TownRatings grades history →
From Wikimedia Commons (2), the Library of Congress (4), U.S. Geological Survey historical maps, U.S. Census counts (via Wikipedia), the US Post Offices dataset (Blevins & Helbock), the USGS Geographic Names Information System and old county and town histories (Internet Archive). Archive images are copied here with their credits and licenses, shown on each photo’s page. Refreshed monthly.
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2021
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