24/7 Trauma and Biohazard Cleanup in Manning, IA

Manning is a city in Carroll County, Iowa, along Iowa Highway 141 near the source of the West Nishnabotna River.

Manning is named for Orlando Harrison Manning, a former lieutenant governor of Iowa.

Before the town existed, the site was a swampy, nearly treeless prairie used as hunting grounds by the Iowa people.

Manning grew up around a railroad crossing — the Iowa Southwestern was completed in 1880 with yards and a depot built at the townsite in 1881, and the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul Railroad crossed it the same year.

Manning voters approved incorporation on February 17, 1882, by a margin of 171 votes to 4, and the town was declared incorporated the next day.

Manning had 1,455 residents in the 2020 census, living in 651 households and 353 families.

Manning's centerpiece attraction is a genuine German hausbarn built in 1660 near Klein Offenseth in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany — it was dismantled, shipped to Iowa in 1996, and reassembled piece by piece at the Manning Hausbarn Heritage Park, opening to the public in 2000.

The Manning hausbarn, a thatched-roof building where a farm family once lived under the same roof as its livestock, is described as the oldest and largest house barn in the United States.

Manning's German heritage also shows in the Bavarian-style storefronts along Main Street and the German Playhouse in City Park.

In 1948, tiny Manning's boys basketball team won the Iowa state championship, beating the much larger Davenport school 46-43 in a game often compared to the movie Hoosiers.