Talk:Benjamin Franklin Allen/GA1

GA review

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Nominator: ActuallyElite (talk · contribs) 14:02, 16 July 2026 (UTC)

Reviewer: ABehjat (talk · contribs) 20:45, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

Hi there! I'll be doing your GAN review. I'll circle back on this in a few days. Thank you! - ABehjat (talk) 20:45, 5 August 2026 (UTC)

Hi @ActuallyElite,

Thanks for writing this and for your patience. This is an interesting subject, and after reviewing the references I think the bones of a Good Article are here: good structure, real and reliable sourcing base, two free images, and a clear narrative arc from Fort Des Moines to the Cook County collapse.

However, I'm placing it on hold rather than passing it, because a close read against the sources turned up more than prose polish: some passages reproduce source wording too closely (copyvio score is a bit too high against the Iowa government website), several statements don't match the source cited for them (like the number of children - he had 4), and a few major aspects that your own sources cover aren't in the article yet. None of this is hard to fix, and the sources you need are ones you already have.

GA review (see here for what the criteria are, and here for what they are not)
It is reasonably well written. a (prose, spelling, and grammar): b (MoS for lead, layout, word choice, fiction, and lists): It is factually accurate and verifiable, as shown by a source spot-check. a (references): b (citations to reliable sources): c (OR): d (copyvio and plagiarism): It is broad in its coverage. a (major aspects): b (focused): It follows the neutral point of view policy. Fair representation without bias: It is stable. No edit wars, etc.: It is illustrated by images, where possible and appropriate. a (images are tagged and non-free images have fair use rationales): b (suitable captions):
Overall: Pass/Fail:
· · ·

2d. Close paraphrasing — please start here

This is the one blocker. A few passages follow the wording of their sources too closely for WP:CLOP. The longest is 25 consecutive words:

• Allen would eventually go on to serve as a senator in the Iowa state legislature, representing Polk County during the thirteenth and fourteenth general assemblies — word-for-word from the Terrace Hill page.
• property along the proposed route west to the Missouri River, established a land company (14 words) — same source.
• to collect an inheritance from his uncle, Captain James Allen (10 words) — same source.
• heavily in debt and wanted use of the bank's money — from Wiggins, whose sentence runs he was insolvent and heavily in debt and wanted use of the bank's money and thus at least temporarily to avoid prison.
• lived with his grandfather in Ohio until and was responsible for establishing Fort Des Moines (7 words each) — same source.

Five of the six are from the single Terrace Hill page, which I think matters. I screened all five of your sources, and Andrews produces no overlap at all — that material is entirely in your own words 🙏

Earwig returns 37.1% against that Terrace Hill page under a "Violation unlikely" banner, and I'm not treating that banner as decisive. The tool reserves its flags for considerably higher ratios, and 37.1% against a single source sits near the top of its "unlikely" band. What it reports is overall similarity; it doesn't adjudicate a 25-word verbatim run, which is what WP:CLOP turns on. Two of its other figures should also be discounted rather than read as clean: the Annals of Iowa 0.0% is that host's bot-check refusing the request, and the Google Books URL in your Andrews citation has preview disabled (gbpv=0), so there was no book text for Earwig to compare — which is why I checked Andrews separately from a scan (it's clean; see below).

The reason why this is important is because terracehill.iowa.gov is a State of Iowa site, and US state works are not automatically public domain the way federal works are. For that reason, I'd like to ask if you can resolve potential WP:COPYVIO and WP:PLAG violations:

In essence, write each fact in your own sentence structure, and reopen them only to check. Short unavoidable strings (e.g. "In 1854, Allen married Arathusa West") are fine.

Next steps

Stop following your sources' wording so closely, and at the same time bring in more of what those sources contain:

• Facts aren't copyrightable; expression is. "The Des Moines Coal Company was organised in 1865 by Allen and Wesley Redhead" takes nothing protectable from Andrews. What can't be reused is his phrasing, expressions and sentence architecture. For example, "cleaned out", "burrowing around", the order of his clauses.
• Write more, in your own sentence shapes. The article is at the moment both closer to its sources than it should be and thinner than they are, which is the usual sign of drafting with the source open on screen. Try writing the information in your own words while comparing against the source.

• Where a source's wording really is worth keeping, quote it and attribute it. Andrews's tallow candles and lard oil being the only illuminants is accurate and short; a marked, attributed quotation is entirely legitimate (WP:COPYQUOTE). It's the unmarked stuff that causes the problem, not the borrowing as such. Just don't over-correct into wall-to-wall quotation - too much quoted text is its own problem 😅.

2b. Statements that don't match the source cited for them

I've read all five of your sources in full. Taking the spot-check (WP:GAN/I#R3) first, since most of it comes out well: your dates (April 27, 1829 and April 14, 1914) are confirmed by both the Annals and the legislature record — Wiggins is the outlier at April 26/15, so you've followed the majority correctly. Salem, Indiana is stated outright by both. The 1870–74 term is sourced (a member of the Senate of the state of Iowa 1870-74). Senate District 29 is in the page's sidebar. Parker, Henigbaum and Quigley are correctly credited — they signed the memorial resolution. And two criminal trials … over a period of eight years verifies exactly, in your own words rather than the source's. The following are the points that need work.

• California forestry — federal, not state. He later worked for the California government as a forestry supervisor, but the Annals — the source cited for it — says he supervised forestry service in California for the Federal Government, and Wiggins independently says the federal forest service in California. Both sources agree against the article.
• The crash date needs its citation aligned. but in 1876, the bank crashed is sourced — to Andrews (p. 65, in 1876 it collapsed) — but the sentence cites State of Iowa, which says January 1875. Please cite whichever you're following; see the Andrews section below.
• Hubbell, not Hubble. Frederick M. Hubble → Hubbell — spelled out on the cited page (when Frederick M. Hubbell purchased the property for $60,000) and again in the Annals (Mr. F. M. Hubbell).
• The Rock Island Railroad — "organized" overstates it, and the wikilink makes it worse. In 1865, Allen organized the Rock Island Railroad follows Terrace Hill, but the Annals says he became a stockholder and director in the Rock Island railroad and assisted It to reach Des Moines in 1867 — a materially different claim. And the link points at the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific, organized in 1852, so as it stands the sentence has him founding a railroad that already existed. I suspect what he organized was a Des Moines extension or subsidiary. The Annals wording is safer and more informative.
• The general store was 1848, not 1850. In 1850, he started a sawmill and opened a general store merges two ventures under one date. The Annals puts the sawmill in 1850 (with Charles Van, at the south end of the old Coon River bridge) but has him entering the mercantile business at once on arriving in 1848, with Jonathan Lyon, at Second and Vine — where Terrace Hill also places the store.
• The 1855 bank — right name, wrong role and date. The State National Bank of Des Moines is named by the memorial resolution, but its account differs from the article's: Allen became a director of the State Bank of Iowa's Des Moines branch, and that branch eventually was merged into the national bank system, the Des Moines branch becoming the State National Bank of Des Moines — so later than 1855, and not as its founder. Wiggins has his own 1855 venture as B. F. Allen & Co., and Andrews p. 58 words the merger differently again (the National State Bank). Rather than compressing all three, I'd follow one and say which.
• Children — your three are sourced, but they're the survivors, not the total. The memorial resolution reads Mrs. Allen and their younger daughter long years ago preceded husband and father … Three children remain: Mrs. Swords of New York city, and Messrs. Frank and Harry of California — which is exactly your "a daughter, and two sons named Frank and Harry". So the phrasing is well-founded; it's the framing that's off, because that's a count of who outlived him in 1915. Wiggins says The Allens had six children, two of whom died in infancy, and Terrace Hill names four by 1869 (Kathryn, Frank Jr., Bessie, Harry). Suggest "three of his children survived him", with |children=6 in the infobox.
• escape conviction keeps the source's verdict but drops its reason. The cited page reads Allen escaped conviction as the juries believed he vainly poured his own assets into the bank to save it, and adds that many local residents believed the same. Without that clause the article reads as though he evaded justice, where the source describes juries persuaded he had genuinely tried to save the bank. Worth restoring — it's the more interesting fact anyway.
• The senate district — keep the number, reconsider the link. |district=29th is properly sourced. But the article links the modern Iowa's 29th Senate district, and the ga=14 view of your own source is headed "Iowa Senate Districts 1872-1873" — i.e. district 29 as it then was. 1870s numbering doesn't carry forward, so the link implies a continuity that isn't there. The number is fine; the link is what I'd drop or re-target.
• One sourcing note. The Iowa Legislature page is really two things: a database record (dates, party, assemblies, district) and an 1915 memorial resolution adopted by the Senate. The latter is a primary source and openly eulogistic — man of benevolence, princely fortune, so potently helpful — and it omits the fraud trials altogether, framing Chicago as an attempt to save from ruin the bank. Excellent for hard facts; I'd avoid leaning on it for characterisation. Adding |type=/a note that it reproduces the 36th GA (1915) Senate Journal resolution would also help readers judge it.

2b (cont.). The gas and coal companies — the source says something different

Separating this out because it's the clearest accuracy problem in the article, and because your page numbers are right, so it isn't a citation error. Andrews (Vol I, pp. 58–59) reads:

In 1865, the war over, business was rapidly resumed and great progress was made in city improvements. Allen organized the first Gas Company, tallow candles and lard oil being the only illuminants. The works were located at the corner of Second and Elm streets. A large sum of money was expended in an effort to produce hydro-carbon gas from coal and superheated steam. The gas could be generated, but it was impossible to get crucibles, or reto[r]ts, which would resist the required int[en]se heat. They would crack, causing so much leakage, loss of time, material and labor, it was abandoned, and the ordinary gas method adopted. But it was an ideal gas and had intense heating properties.

In 1865, Allen, with Wesley Re[d]head and others, organized the Des Moines Coal Company. Redhead had been burrowing around in spots sufficient to show presence of coal near the city, and the company, with ample capital, was formed for systematic mining. As coal was near the surface and in pockets, it was soon cleaned out.

Against the article's He started the first gas company in Des Moines, which was later abandoned. He then later organized a coal company which was soon cleaned out, three things come out differently — all three, I think, from reading "it" as pointing at the company:

• The gas company was not abandoned; the experiment was. What failed was the attempt to make hydro-carbon gas from coal and superheated steam, because the retorts cracked under the heat. Andrews then says the company adopted the ordinary gas method — so it carried on, just by conventional means.
• The coal was cleaned out, not the company. As coal was near the surface and in pockets, it was soon cleaned out — the shallow pocket deposits were quickly exhausted.
• There's no "then later". Andrews dates both ventures to 1865.

While you're in this passage, there's a good deal here worth having that the article currently leaves out: the coal company had a name (Des Moines Coal Company) and a co-founder (Wesley Redhead, who'd been prospecting the shallow coal near the city — no article on him to link, but worth naming), the gas works stood at Second and Elm streets, and the whole thing sits in the post-war building boom of 1865.

Andrews — spot-checked, and it holds up

I read the Andrews chapter (Vol I, pp. 55–65) from a scan and checked it separately.

• All four of your Andrews page numbers are correct — pp. 58–59 for the gas and coal companies, p. 59 for the insurance company, p. 64 for the Water Company, p. 65 for the California move, verified against the running heads.
• Your Andrews paraphrasing is clean. Screened for close paraphrase, the chapter produces no overlap with the article — that material is entirely in your own words. The only borrowed wording is the phrase cleaned out, which is a clarity point (below) rather than a WP:CLOP one.
• E. J. Ingersoll verifies — p. 59: he, with E. J. Ingersoll, organized the Hawkeye Insurance Company, which is still doing business at the old stand. All that's missing is the company's name.
• The 1876 crash date is sourced — p. 65, in 1876 it collapsed. The one thing to fix is that the sentence carrying it cites State of Iowa, which says January 1875: please cite whichever you're following, ideally with an {{efn}} noting the conflict. (The Chicago move splits the same way — 1873 in Terrace Hill and the memorial resolution, 1874 in Andrews and the Annals. Your 1873 has two sources, so it's fine.)
• The $8,000 verifies as a calculation. It's on p. 61, in the quoted Register account: two thousand dollars' worth were used in decorations and some six thousand dollars being expended in the supper — $6,000 + $2,000 = $8,000, with "food and flowers" mapping onto the two exactly. Sound arithmetic (WP:CALC), but currently cited to the wrong source and a little opaque; I'd give both figures and cite p. 61. Two smaller things in the same sentence: Andrews gives no guest count anywhere, so over 700 rests on Terrace Hill's plain "700 guests" and the "over" isn't supported; and The house took 2 years doesn't square with constructed between 1866 and 1869. The $250,000 is also Terrace Hill's figure for "the building and grounds".
• On the Rock Island, Andrews settles it against "organized". p. 59: In 1867, the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad reached the city. Allen was one of the directors and a large stockholder. Andrews and the Annals agree he was a director and shareholder who helped bring the line in, against Terrace Hill's lone "organized". Your wikilink is right — Andrews names the CRI&P — it's the verb that needs changing. Andrews also has him organizing a Land Company for the town sites in wording quite unlike Terrace Hill's, which lets you source that sentence and get clear of the close-paraphrase problem in one move.
• One volume note. Pioneers of Polk County is a two-volume work and your {{cite book}} has no |volume= — worth adding, since "p. 58, 59" is otherwise ambiguous. Volume II also carries Allen material, freely readable at archive.org. A readable |url= would also help the next reviewer — the current Google Books link has preview disabled (gbpv=0), which is why Earwig's 5.7% against it means nothing.

3a. Aspects your own sources cover that the article doesn't

I think there are some important things in the sources you already cite that haven't made it into the article:

• The Panic of 1857, which is what made his reputation. He endorsed struggling firms' promissory notes and lent out sound Nebraska bank notes, keeping Des Moines businesses alive. Terrace Hill: he became a local hero. Wiggins: a godsend to grateful creditors.
• What he did as a senator — and your own sources now answer this precisely. Right now his legislative service is two sentences with no content. The memorial resolution: he was chairman of the Committee on the Suppression of Intemperance in the Thirteenth General Assembly and of the Committee on Banks in the Fourteenth, and was chosen by the people of the county of Polk in 1869; the sidebar also lists his 14th-GA standing committees (Banks, Claims, Public Buildings, Railroads, Ways and Means). On the Capitol, all three of these sources agree — Terrace Hill: influential in securing the legislation providing for the new Capitol building; the Annals the same; the resolution: His work here is largely reflected in the stately edifice in which this body sits. This is the single easiest big improvement available to you.
• How big the fortune was. The lead calls him Iowa's first millionaire but never gives a figure. Terrace Hill: between 4 and 12 million dollars at its height, with landholdings at least 93 square miles or more.
• What actually ruined him. Terrace Hill has him court-appointed to hold over $500,000 in railroad bonds in trust, and then: he used the railroad trust funds to speculate, a decision that would ultimately contribute to his financial ruin. Its downfall section closes the loop — his debt was significant, having borrowed the railroad trust funds for his own investments, and he bought the bank in desperation to pay off his debts to the courts. That chain is the spine of the whole story, and the article attributes the collapse to the bank alone.
• More of the Cook County episode than you've used. Also from that section: he bought controlling interest rather than the whole bank, in May 1873, and was elected president; one of the two fraud cases went to the United States Supreme Court; the litigation over liquidating his estate dragged on until the mid-1880s; and he kept Terrace Hill and eight acres of immediate grounds until 1884. The Supreme Court case especially seems worth a clause.
• He was orphaned at four (both sources; 1833 cholera epidemic). This also fixes a prose gap — as written, the reader is never told why he was living with a grandfather.
• What Terrace Hill is today. The article never says the house became the Iowa Governor's Residence and a National Historic Landmark — which for many readers is the reason they're here. Wiggins mentions it in passing (now the governor's residence), and the caption is a natural home for it.
• "Frank". Wiggins titles the entry Allen, Benjamin Franklin "Frank", and the memorial resolution says he was universally called Frank. Worth adding to your {{efn}} of name variants.
• Where he's buried. The Annals: The body was cremated and the ashes placed in the family lot in Woodland cemetery, Des Moines. The article gives no disposition at all, and the infobox has no resting place.
• An entire business that's missing. The Annals: in 1851 he and R. W. Sypher bought a steamboat at St. Louis for the Des Moines River trade; the resolution adds it was the first boat to reach the forks of the Raccoon.
• Your insurance company has a name. The Annals calls it the Hawkeye Insurance Company (the article says only "an insurance company with E. J. Ingersoll").
• Early partners, all named and all currently absent: Jonathan Lyon (store), Charles Van (sawmill), R. W. Sypher (steamboat).
• The 1850s banking crisis, which three of your sources treat as central. The Annals: he came through the wildcat banking period of 1855 to 1858 with credit intact, winning recognition as one of the leading bankers of the West; the resolution explains why his Bank of Nebraska notes had the highest reputation; Wiggins and Terrace Hill cover the Panic of 1857 rescue.
• An assessment of his significance — the article has no legacy material at all, though every source offers some. The Annals: He is credited with doing more toward developing the city of Des Moines in its early history than any other one man. Do attribute rather than assert it (WP:VOICE) — it's an obituary.
• A nice detail if you want one: the resolution says he earned his first money in Indiana selling fruit — which is what he returned to in California. Andrews names the place he farmed: San Dimas.
• The people who lost money — of everything in this list, the omission I'd most want fixed. Andrews p. 65 says the failure swallowed the thousands of hard earnings of plain working people and business men who had entrusted their money to his custody, that public meetings were held amid deep mutterings of personal vengeance, and that after the litigation there was little or nothing for creditors, especially small depositors least able to bear the loss. The article's account of the collapse is entirely about what Allen lost. Terrace Hill makes the same point about their losses for which he was responsible.
• His wife's death. Andrews p. 65: his wife, grief-stricken and broken-hearted, in January, went to her final rest; the memorial resolution confirms she and a younger daughter predeceased him. The article never mentions it.
• A second sourced assessment, if you build a legacy sentence: Andrews p. 65, from 1858 to 1876 he controlled the financial and monetary affairs of this community, with his lending described (ten per cent and mortgage security, but never oppressive and generous with gifts to worthy objects).
• Smaller Andrews details: an earlier house — in 1857 he built a large two-story brick residence on the block later occupied by the Iowa Hotel, noted for the receptions and hospitality dispensed therein; the City Council seat was for the Second Ward; the Water Company had $300,000 capital and later passed to Polk & Hubbell; and Terrace Hill's furnishings included a Chickering grand square piano at $1,700 and a drawing-room table at $1,000.
• The end of the story — where your sources genuinely diverge, so handle with care. Wiggins has Leadville beginning a series of failures and then He was dismissed from his final job-a good one with the federal forest service in California- for graft. Andrews (writing in 1904) has him simply engaged in fruit raising at San Dimas, and the Annals says only that he lived in retirement for several years. Only Wiggins reports the dismissal, but he is the modern scholarly source and the other two are a contemporary reminiscence and an obituary; I'd include it with in-text attribution rather than either asserting or omitting it.

1a/1b. Prose and MoS — all small

• MOS:NUMERAL — integers zero to nine get spelled out: 3 children → three; took 2 years → two; In the span of 8 years, 2 criminal trials → eight / two.
• which was soon cleaned out — besides misreading the source (above), the phrase is Andrews's and means little to a modern reader once detached from his "coal … in pockets" (WP:JARGON). Say the shallow deposits were quickly exhausted.
• Allen also organized multiple energy companies — "energy companies" is a modern umbrella no source uses; Andrews frames the gas works as illumination (tallow candles and lard oil being the only illuminants). Just name the two companies.
• He then later organized — "then later" is redundant, and per Andrews both were 1865. There's also a stray double space in but in 1876.
• with Allen being able to escape conviction — grammatically awkward however you read it; "he was tried twice for fraud and neither jury convicted him" is smoother. See also the substantive point above about the missing reason.
• MOS:LEADFOLLOWSBODY — Iowa's first millionaire is the lead's headline claim and appears nowhere in the body. It's well sourced; put it in the body and let the lead summarize.
• The lead's last clause, causing him to move to California and grow fruit, makes the collapse mono-causal and skips Leadville. Once the trust-fund material is in, this should read more naturally.
• ($180,000 today) — please use {{Inflation}} (e.g. {{Inflation|US|8000|1869|r=-3}}), which is sourced and updates itself, rather than a hard-coded figure.

What's already passing

• 2a — referencing apparatus is sound; {{Sfnp}} shortened footnotes all resolve and every paragraph is cited.
• 3b — focused; nothing off-topic, and the Terrace Hill weighting is right for a man best known for building it.
• 4 — neutral, and I want to be explicit that you picked the right source on the contested point. Your three sources frame Chicago incompatibly: Andrews (1908) has him as a victim of unconscionable bank sharks; the 1915 memorial resolution has him undertook to save from ruin the bank; Wiggins says he was insolvent and heavily in debt and wanted use of the bank's money to avoid prison. Following Wiggins — a modern university-press reference work over a contemporary reminiscence and a legislature eulogy — is correct per WP:AGE MATTERS and WP:SCHOLARSHIP, and I'd not want the hold read as pressure to soften it. The one thing I would add is the depositors (see 3a), which is the part all three sources agree on.
• 5 — stable. 24 revisions, all constructive, no reverts or disputes.
• 6 — both images are free on Commons (File:B F Allen sm.jpg public domain; File:Terracehill.jpg CC BY-SA 3.0), relevant and captioned.

Result

Hold

Do push back on anything where you think I've read a source wrongly. Ping me when you've had a run at it and I'll take another look.

- ABehjat (talk) 23:21, 6 August 2026 (UTC)