Some date edits, and a highway that was legally dead

Going through the legal descriptions of Iowa highways — just the state ones, not the US routes — have merited some editing to some pages. Mostly, these are fixes to time spans, now that we have dates of Highway Commission action if not the signs coming down in the field.

In some cases, what’s on the page wasn’t what was on the field. For example, the end of IA 283 was supposed to be a block east of where the “End” sign was. In cases like that I left it alone. On IA 364, the 1980 route log disagrees with the legal route description on whether the end in Harpers Ferry was 2nd or 3rd Street, but for the time being I am leaving that off the page. (More on that, and cases like it, to come.)

Minor changes were made to the following pages: 77, 103, 111, 130, 142, 186, 365, and 394 South. The IA 234 and 245 pages got a little more about their piecemeal decommissionings.

More substantial changes were made to the following:

  • We now have an intersection for the end of IA 246.  There’s some discrepancy as to what street is named what, but the southeast corner of the square was the end of the route.
  • IA 328‘s north end has been corrected to First Street, and the photos with old US 20 moved down the page to be the closest to the city limits, where there was a secret route until 1987.
  • IA 154 was killed off and replaced with an extension of IA 187 Thanksgiving week 1980, a few months after 187 was taken away from its end at Backbone State Park and extended north to IA 3 at Starmont school. That’s why the 1981 map is how it is. All of the new-sign photos at its ends will stay on the 187 page, and it’s possible I may simply combine the two.
  • IA 333 approached its post-2003 endpoint from a different direction in the first few years of its Fremont County life (then it continued with US 275, and then east to US 59). The existence of 333 itself was up for grabs in late 1980 — read the entry on Jason’s site for more. But once it was set, it used Main and E Streets in Hamburg until a project was finished in late 1984. In addition, the legal description appears to say 333 still continues with 275 to the east split at now-J64.
  • IA 341 contained the biggest surprise. Until now, I thought that the little stub between “Old Highway 18” and existing 18 was retained until 2003 because Ruthven wanted a state connection to the city limits, or because the 18 bypass called for it, or because someone simply forgot that that part should have gone to the county. But all of those were wrong. The slight bypass of Ruthven was done in 1966, and the highway was turned over in 1988 — but then in 1993, the state took the stub back! It was never re-signed, but there is a definite break between when the route existed as a signed highway and when it was kept as a secret route.

EDIT: Corrected description of IA 333 information.

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