RUBIO – The Rubio Community Club hosted its annual pancake breakfast fundraiser Saturday morning, May 11 in the Rubio Community Building.

Money from the fundraiser goes toward the building’s maintenance, insurance and utilities. David Long, a member of the Rubio Community Club, said the pancake breakfast usually generates about $3,000 from donations, which is enough to pay for the building’s expenses. He said it takes about $2,500 per year to keep the building open.

The Rubio Community Building was originally a railroad depot. When the railroad sold it, it was moved away from the tracks to its current location in 1951, and has served as a community building ever since. Today, the club leases the building for private parties such as birthdays, weddings and class reunions, and Long said it’s almost always rented on Thanksgiving, too.

Long said that Rubio, like a lot of small towns in Iowa, is losing population. At one time, the town had 138 people, but has a fraction of that now, maybe 20-25 inhabitants. The Rubio Community Club has 12 members, but only a couple of them live in the town of Rubio itself, while the others live in the surrounding countryside.

“Back in the day when the school bus came into town, the kids from town would pretty much fill the school bus,” Long said. “There are no kids in town now. There’s not the population here that there once was.”

Long said that, during the town’s heyday, it had two hardware stores, a grocery store, a lumberyard, a pickle cannery, a meat processing facility and a car leadership.

In recent years, the Rubio Community Club has received grants from local organizations to improve the building. The Washington County Historical Society helped the club fix the foundation two years ago, and grants from the Washington County Riverboat Foundation have gone toward a new roof, heater and air conditioner, and a modern septic system.

The building was previously available to rent all year-round, but Long said the club now closes it from December through March because few people want to rent it during that time, and it was too expensive to heat.

According to Tom Savage’s 2007 book, “A Dictionary of Iowa Place Names,” Rubio was founded in 1900 when the Milwaukee Road was constructed. The town was named after Pascual Ortiz Rubio, who went on to be the President of Mexico from 1930-1932.