Kate Shelley

[2] Catherine Carroll Shelley was born at Loughaun, a crossroads near the village of Dunkerrin and the town of Moneygall, in County Offaly, Ireland.

[3] Dunkerrin Catholic Church records show that her parents, Michael and Margaret Shelley, married on February 24, 1863, and she was baptized on December 12, 1863.

[3] They first lived with relatives near Freeport, Illinois, then built a home on about 163 acres (0.66 km2) near Honey Creek, a perennial tributary stream to the Des Moines River in Boone County, Iowa located to the east of Moingona.

[5] Shelley gained fame due to her heroic actions in the aftermath of the collapse of the Des Moines River Bridge.

On the afternoon of July 6, 1881, heavy thunderstorms caused a flash flood of Honey Creek, Iowa, washing out timbers that supported the railroad trestle.

[6] Shelley heard the crash, and knew that an eastbound express passenger train was due in Moingona about midnight, stopping shortly before heading east over the Des Moines River and then Honey Creek.

[9] In the early 1880s, Frances E. Willard, a reformer and temperance leader, wrote Shelley's friend, Isabella Parks, who was the wife of the president of Simpson College at Indianola, offering $25 toward an advanced education for her.

An Armenian rug, woven in the display window of a Chicago furniture store, was auctioned for that amount, retiring the mortgage, and other Chicagoans donated an additional $417.

In July 1896, it was reported that Shelley had applied to the Iowa legislature for employment in the State House as a menial because she was destitute and had to support her mother and invalid brother.

Although there were apparently men interested in Shelley, supposedly including the switchman in the yard at Moingona,[11] she never married and lived most of her life with her mother and sister Mary, known as "Mayme".

[14] Years later, the Chicago and North Western Railway began operating streamlined passenger trains, and named one the Kate Shelley 400.

The Iowa poet and politician, John Brayshaw Kaye, wrote a poem in Shelley's honor called, "Our Kate", in his collection Songs of Lake Geneva (1882).