RoadsideThoughts
A Gazetteer for the United States and Canada
Home >> State of Iowa >> Polk County >> Des Moines >> Nearby CommunitiesIndex...

Nearest Communities to Des Moines,
Listed County-By-County

The purpose of this page is to identify those communities that are closest to Des Moines, on a County-by-County basis. To explain further, let's use the example from the Genealogy Helper Page for Des Moines:

We have great-grandparents who lived in a small city in the northwest corner of their home county. During their lives, most doctors and hospitals were in the next county to the west. Almost all of the nearby churches and cemeteries were in the county to the north.

When doing our research, we make it a practice to expand our search by looking in neighboring counties in addition to the county in which they lived:  their home county contained property and probate records; the county to the west contained birth and death records; the county to the north contained their burial records. If we hadn't checked the neighboring counties, we would have missed many valuable sources of information.

Please note that when we give a distance, it's a 'straight-line' distance.<1>

If you're researching your genealogy, we hope that the following information helps.

Des Moines is primarily located in Polk County and is the County Seat. A portion of Des Moines extends into Warren County.

The following 7 counties adjoin and form the boundaries of Polk County: Boone, Dallas, Jasper, Madison, Marion, Story & Warren.

Our Gazetteer shows that there are 182 communities within 40 miles [64.4 km]<1> of Des Moines. Of these communities, 116 are located in counties other than Polk County.

We usually exclude communities where we still need to verify their location,<2> but for the purpose of this page, we have included the unverified ('unver') and historic ('hist') communities.

After starting with the home county for Des Moines (which is Polk County), we list the counties in alphabetical order and for each of those counties, the closest communities are listed in order of their distance from Des Moines

For the following list, only those counties that contain communities within 40 miles [64.4 km] are displayed.

Footnotes ...

<1>Our distances are not driving distances, but are calculated as a 'straight-line' (or point-to-point) distance. A straight line distance ignores things like rivers, canyons, lakes, et cetera - it's truly a line drawn from Point A (ie- Des Moines) to Point B. In other words: 'As the crow flies'.
<2>Our data comes from many sources and some sources are more dependable than others. When we add communities to our Gazetteer, we try to verify that we have the correct location for the community. We mark a community as 'Unverified' when we aren't confident about our data and want to do further checking.

We use the term 'Historic' broadly and it generally means that the community no longer exists. However, it can also mean that the community might still exist, but was larger or had a more 'official' existence in the past than it does now.

Since our Gazetteer contains over 100,000 communities, verifying everything is going to take time. If you find an error or can help us to improve our accuracy, please let us know.
<3>While we're fans and frequent users of TripAdvisor, you should know that we're also members of the TripAdvisor affiliate program.