September 29, 2015: Iowa’s Prairie Castle of Otranto. The vines certainly add a gothic touch.
The school in tiny Otranto, just south of the Minnesota border, was in use for 50 years and closed in 1966, according to a reprinted article on the Mitchell County IAGenWeb site. That makes this structure a century old this year. According to a Mitchell County Press-News article from 2006 about an all-school reunion for Otranto,* the last high school class graduated in 1943 and after that it was an elementary school. Otranto rejected consolidation with St. Ansgar in 1956, which created a minor problem when some of the land planned for the new St. Ansgar Community School District was separated from the rest of the new district. Otranto held on for a while longer — “Otranto objects to loss of school under merger” is a headline in the Austin (MN) Daily Herald Feb. 27, 1962.
Also in Otranto, an 1899 truss bridge with an unusual design spanning the Cedar River, bypassed in 1999, was dismantled in March 2014 under mysterious circumstances.
*That article uses the same history text in the last paragraph as an Austin Daily Herald article from 2000 and Northwood Anchor article from 2003 about previous Otranto all-school reunions. Hmm…