Salem is a city in Henry County, Iowa, United States. The population was 394 at the epoch of the 2020 census.

Salem was decided originally by Quakers bearing in mind the intent that it be a community of Friends. In 1835 Aaron Street, while wending his pretension westward, came upon an uninhabited spot and declared “Now have mine eyes beheld a country teeming with all good thing…Hither will I come bearing in mind my flocks and my herds, with my children and my children’s children, and our city shall be called Salem, for so was the city of our fathers, even near unto the seacoast.” Independently another Quaker, Isaac Pigeon, who may have visited the spot previously Street, brought his relations to the area. They became the first citizens of Salem, and subsequent to Peter Boyer, began to recruit other Quakers to migrate westward to belong to them. As in advance as 1837, Friends meetings were held in private homes, and after the village was laid out in 1839 by Aaron Street Jr., and Peter Boyer, a meeting house was built. From the in the future years members of supplementary Christian denominations settled in Salem, so it was never an exclusively Quaker community.

Being on your own twenty miles from the Missouri border, Salem became an important depot on the Underground Railroad. A prominent enthusiast of the abolitionists was Henderson Lewelling. His home on West Main St. is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as an Underground Railroad station. The Friends, however, had a dispute over the concern of abolition. Agreed in their enemy to slavery, they disagreed upon actively helping slaves escape. In 1846, 50 members of the community, including Lewelling, were disfellowshiped. In 1847, the Lewelling relations traveled by covered wagon along the Oregon Trail along following a special covered wagon that had been expected to transport higher than 700 teenager fruit and nut trees, apples, pears, peaches, cherries, quince, walnut, and hickory. The permanent trees became the parent buildup of anything of the to the fore orchards in the Pacific Northwest.

The Society of Friends also received a literary in Salem. Whittier College, unrelated to the scholarly of the same name in California, existed from 1868 to 1910.