Doris, Iowa
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Doris and Bethel are twin town sites in Buchanan County, Iowa, both located just north of Highway 939 in central Buchanan County near Independence. Founded as whistle-stops along the Chicago and Northwestern Railway, the sites are abandoned today.
The town sites are located three fourths of a mile apart, Doris at the junction of Highway 939 and North Doris Avenue, an unimproved and unpaved gravel road located between Winthrop and Independence. Bethel is less than a mile west, near the intersection of 939 and Nathan Bethel Avenue. Both towns were populated during the 1940s and 1950s, but with the advent of rural migration to larger communities, the sites gradually emptied. By the 1990s, Bethel had lost all but a few scattered farmhouses. Doris is completely abandoned, and all the buildings there, excluding the ruins of a mill, have long since been razed to make way for fields.
