By the 1850s, Athens had expanded onto the bluff, and its businesses and organizations from about 1853 to 1860 show a growing town with general stores, carpenters, builders, coopers, blacksmiths, grocers, wagon makers, painters, mills, manufacturers, a coal dealer, a livery stable, druggists, a baker, a tailor, physicians, ministers, a school teacher, a butcher, a hotel proprietor, a postmaster, and local officials. The Keokuk, Fort Des Moines and Minnesota Railroad Company had a station agent in Athens, and on the eve of the Civil War the town was a steamboat port and a grain, livestock, and manufacturing center. Plans to connect Athens to the railroad at Croton were interrupted by the Civil War. Pre-Civil War Athens had five churches: a Baptist, Presbyterian, Christian, and two Methodist. Other nineteenth-century businesses and organizations included a paint and carriage shop, a wagon factory, a shoe repair shop, a blacksmith shop, a Masonic Lodge, an Express Office, a large brick two-story public school, and an academy. Athens was also served by a stagecoach line running from Alexandria through Athens to Bloomfield, Iowa. Its population was reported as over 500 in the mid-1850s, and the town continued to thrive and grow up to the Civil War, but pro-South sentiments during the war brought hardship afterward. After Athens missed its last chance to secure a railroad in 1886, the town declined; by 1887 many houses and businesses had been moved to the new town of Revere, and by 1900 Athens had only about 50 residents.