April 18, 2006: Even when there wasn’t a river highway between Dubuque and Davenport, IA 62 came to Bellevue.
This next batch of routes is of small to medium length, covering only two counties tops. One end was in a county seat and the other was in a town with a population above 1000. Some of these numbers are familiar to us today.
- IA 62, Maquoketa to Bellevue: Present US 52 would not be built for more than a decade, because on the Mississippi River, the rivers and railroads had the edge. The section of road coming into Bellevue joined the Honey Creek Cut on the opposite side of the state as two of the first major Highway Commission projects.
- IA 77, Fairfield to Keota: In 1920, IA 2 went through Keota, so it wasn’t a spur at that time. It was dropped from Jefferson County in the Great Truncation, and by the Second Great Decommissioning all that remained was the spur to Keota.
- IA 48, Red Oak to Shenandoah: 48 has kept its number for a century. The corridor is the same, but the exact roads are different. Shenandoah is a large enough community that 48’s original end wasn’t immediately obvious. If IHC documents hadn’t become available online, I’d still be guessing.
- IA 63, Oskaloosa to Grinnell: The southern half of IA 146 today, the Mahaska County part (south of New Sharon) was dropped in the Great Truncation.
- IA 57, Grundy Center to Cedar Falls: IA 57 has never been decommissioned, but it runs on an entirely different route. As late as 1986 it had the same general route as the original save for dropping the IA 14 multiplex, but extension of the US 20 freeway across Black Hawk County that year resulted in a route swap.
- IA 73, Marengo to Belle Plaine: The shortest route of this batch is most interesting when it was near death. Shortly after years of the IHC being pestered to get the county line road to Dysart added to the system, the number went through some gyrations related to the new federal highway that became US 59 and, quite possibly, existed in two places in the summer of 1934. The original is mostly IA 212.
- IA 76, Wapello to West Liberty via Columbus Junction: Changed in the Great Renumbering to IA 70.