Bonnie and Clyde Robbed This Bank
Stuart, Iowa. Monday, April 16, 1934. 9:10 in the morning.
Two young men walked into the First National Bank at the corner of North Division and 2nd Street. One asked the assistant cashier to change a $20 bill. When the cashier looked up, he was looking at a gun. A young woman in a red dress waited outside in the car.
Nobody in Stuart knew who they were. That week’s Stuart Herald called them “two robbers” and printed their license plate. Only later did the country learn the men were Clyde Barrow and Henry Methvin, and the woman in the car was Bonnie Parker. Five weeks after they left Stuart, Bonnie and Clyde were killed by lawmen in Louisiana. The Stuart job was one of the last bank robberies attributed to them.
The building is still here. You can stand where the crowd stood.
First National Bank, Stuart, Iowa. Courtesy of Bob Cook, Stuart Iowa Home Town.
What happened that morning
The Stuart Herald of April 20, 1934 laid it out from the people who were there.
The car had been noticed early, out near the Lincoln Center school. It pulled into the Miller brothers’ Standard Oil station, where Vic Miller filled it with ten gallons of Ethyl and Mr. Bracewell wrote down the plate number because the passengers looked like “a hard looking lot.” By 8:30 it was parked a block north of Nassau Street. Two men walked downtown, stopped at Lovely’s drug store, and were served Cokes by Verne Lovely, who noticed they smelled of liquor. Then they walked to the bank.
Inside, assistant cashier Harold Cronkhite and bookkeeper Lucile Lyddon were ordered to the floor. Maurece Lydon from the creamery was in the lobby. Bank president Frank Eckardt walked in mid-robbery to make a deposit, was told at gunpoint to go behind the counter, and quietly hid his bank book in his clothes before sitting down with the others. The shorter robber scooped the silver off the counter and the bills from a drawer into a red and white striped bag, demanded the safe be opened, and took Cronkhite’s word that the time lock made that impossible. He put everyone in the vault, and the two men walked out to a Pontiac with Iowa plate 13-1234, where the woman was waiting. They drove a block south to Highway 6 and left town headed east.
Mrs. Mary Holmes was the first person into the empty bank. Glenn Bufkin followed, heard voices from the vault, and let everyone out. The whole thing took only a few minutes, and the robbers were gone before anyone on the street knew it had happened. Two cars of Stuart men gave chase, tracing the Pontiac through Dexter to the Shaw corner and north up the Penn Center road before the trail went cold. By Tuesday, word had come back that the car blew a tire in a farmer’s yard three miles north of Pitzer; the robbers spent about ten minutes changing it and drove off east.
The bank never said exactly what was taken. The Herald guessed “probably wasn’t over $1500 and possibly less.” It was insured. Nobody was hurt.
Outside the First National Bank, 1930s. Courtesy of Bob Cook, Stuart Iowa Home Town.
The building
The First National Bank operated on this corner from 1882 to 1944. The 1934 hold-up wasn’t its first. In March 1921, burglars broke in at night, and Stuart’s night watchman, J. K. Myers, was shot in the fight and died of the wound. The bank closed in 1944, and the building spent the decades since as shops and offices before its recent renovation brought the brick back to the street.
A plaque on the building tells the story in short form. Its details differ from the 1934 newspaper in a couple of places (the plaque says the getaway car was an Oldsmobile; the Herald that week said Pontiac), which is how legends work. We’ve followed the paper.
The building today
The renovation is done, and the ground floor is open for a commercial tenant. If your business belongs on the corner where Bonnie and Clyde parked the getaway car, we’d like to hear about it. Our inquiry form goes to the Chamber, the City, and Midwest Partnership at the same time.
Visit
The bank stands at the corner of North Division and 2nd Street in downtown Stuart, just off I-80 at exit 93. The corner entrance is the photo everyone takes. Five miles east near Dexter, a stone monument marks the Dexfield Park shootout of July 1933, where the Barrow gang hid out nine months before they came back for the Stuart bank. Make an afternoon of it.
Sources
Stuart Herald, April 20, 1934, page 1 (“First National Bank Robbed”). Plaque on the building. City of Stuart, History of Stuart. KCCI, “Iowa history: Looking back at Bonnie and Clyde’s Iowa crime sprees,” May 10, 2023. Notes on Iowa, “Bonnie & Clyde Rob Stuart,” April 16, 2025. Historic photographs courtesy of Bob Cook, Stuart Iowa Home Town.
