December 18, 2006: Near the foot of the Burlington Northern Santa Fe railroad bridge across the Mississippi River in Fort Madison, all three components of this sign assembly have changed: US 61 is now Business 61, the Hiawatha Pioneer Trail has been deleted, and IA 2 now ends on the west side of town.
Buried in the Iowa Transportation Commission’s approved revisions to the 2014-18 five-year plan (PDF), and noted in a line at the commission’s Nov. 12 meeting, was this line item:
Transfer of Jurisdiction – Iowa 2 in Fort Madison
Iowa’s fourth-longest east-west state highway no longer runs from state line to state line. I have received word that the route has been truncated to end at the US 61 bypass on the west side of Fort Madison. In addition, Business 61/old 61 north of IA 2 has also been transferred.
There’s an Iowa transportation quirk that has enabled this transfer to happen: The state does not own the auto/rail bridge across the Mississippi River. It was constructed in 1927 for the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad, and is now a BNSF/Amtrak line. Thus, the state can turn over the entire route of old US 61 without leaving an “orphan bridge”.
Except for the section between 35th and 48th streets, US 61 and IA 2 (formerly IA 3) always ran along Avenue L and Avenue H. They changed at 18th Street, and later also at 20th with a switch to one-ways. Avenue L is important to Iowa history because it runs on the easternmost extent of the Sullivan Line, used to delineate the Iowa-Missouri border west of the Des Moines River and the Half-Breed Tract in Lee County. The rural part of the line is still used today to split “North Lee County” and “South Lee County” jurisdiction because both Fort Madison and Keokuk are county seats.
The IA 2 page will be updated to reflect this.