A piece of banking history migrated from northeast Iowa to Greater Des Moines in August, when Rigler Investment Co. of New Hampton bought Clive-based Peoples Trust & Savings Bank from Green Circle Investments Inc.

The Riglers are not strangers to banking or government service.

The late Robert Rigler, son of family banking patriarch John P. Rigler, was a state senator from 1955 to 1971, chairman of the Iowa Highway Commission (now called the Iowa Transportation Commission), and superintendent of banking from 1989 to 1991.

His son, John P. Rigler II, once worked in the Greater Des Moines market for the former Norwest Bank, and was a member of the Federal Home Loan Bank of Des Moines board. He also was chairman of Iowa Business Growth and served on Iowa’s Venture Capital Investment Corp.

John Rigler II is the current president and CEO of State Bank, and chairman of its holding company, Rigler Investment. His son, John P. Rigler III, recently left Wells Fargo & Co. and joined State Bank as senior vice president for business banking.

But let’s go back to the beginning, when John Rigler I moved his family from Montana to New Hampton. A few after arriving in town in 1931, he was asked to make a contribution to the re-election campaign of President Franklin Roosevelt. A die-hard Republican, he refused and was fired from his job as a bank liquidator.

He asked his wife, Ferne, to sell her interest in some Nebraska farmland to capitalize a new bank. The Riglers faced opposition from New Hampton civic leader, banker and merchant C.C. Sheakley.

However, on Mother’s Day 1936, Sheakley died in an automobile accident while en route to Des Moines. According to a newspaper account of the accident, Sheakley, his wife and a companion planned a holiday get-together. The Rigler family believes that during the workweek, he planned to block the charter for their bank.

Whatever the motive for the journey, “we might never have founded our bank if that had not happened,” John Rigler III said.

In 1937, the state granted a charter for Security State Bank, the predecessor of State Bank.

There were other challenges. While stationed in India, during World War II, Robert Rigler received a letter from his father that went into great detail about the attempt of other banking competitors to artificially inflate the value of Security State Bank stock and, hopefully, for the Riglers to pay high dollars to buy back the stock.

“Those birds got to show more stuff than they’ve shown so far to meet the competition,” the elder Rigler wrote to his son after squelching the deal, which was set up to look as though several shareholders were trying to unload their stock, when in fact just a few were involved.

Before he joined the family banking operation, John Rigler II traveled the state as a correspondent banker. One trip found him in Muscatine with his boss and, as it turned out, a competing banker.

“Very late at night his boss proceeded to let the air out of all four of the guy’s tires so that he wouldn’t beat them to their first call. John was embarrassed, but was not about to argue with his boss,” John Rigler III said in an email. To complicate matters, another of the founder’s sons, Jack, was president of Central State Bank in Muscatine and a former member of the Federal Home Loan Bank.

“If word got out of such antics, he would almost certainly hear about it,” John Rigler III said.

Rigler Investment expanded its reach to include banks in Calmar and Ossian that had been owned by Davenport’s Figge family and started a de novo bank in Charles City.

It also has branches in Dike and Janesville, and two locations in Waverly. With the acquisition of Peoples Trust & Savings Bank, Rigler Investment gained operations in Adel, Clive, Grand Junction, Guthrie Center, Jefferson, Ogden, Rippey, Scranton and Waukee, making it among the 25 largest banking operations in the state with total assets of $700 million.