August 23, 2019: The current Essex school, which opened in 1970, is at the southwest corner of town. A vacated portion of original IA 48, an extension of South Avenue, ran through part of the building’s footprint and across home plate of the softball diamond.
IA 48 runs from Shenandoah to Red Oak, as it did in 1920, and now also goes north to US 6, but the original route has next to nothing in common with what you’d drive today.
For about five years (1926-31), IA 48 also went south from Shenandoah to the Missouri state line, only to have IA 4 replace that part. After a short stint as IA 73 (II) in 1934, that road became US 59.
The 1920 route started in Shenandoah, southeast of downtown. A little more than a decade later, it ran on Sheridan Street through downtown of the largest non-county-seat city in Iowa’s southwest quadrant. It did that until being moved to the north side of the city in 1980.
From there, it stairstepped to Essex until a diagonalization in 1930. The 1929 preliminary plan kept a corner at 190th Street and B Avenue.
It is extremely easy to walk on the portion that carried the designation in both 1920 and 2020 — Forbes Street to the M41 junction in Essex. I believe the section-line skip on the north-south road has been there a while, given that the 1930 paving document showed structures on the other side of the railroad.
From Essex to Red Oak, the original route is mostly gravel but has M41 as a farm-to-market designation. The tiny town of Coburg missed out twice, first being ¾ mile east and now 1½ miles west of 48. At Red Oak, it overlapped IA 8 (now US 34) into downtown, ending probably at the courthouse or town square, until an early truncation.
Its extension to US 32 was a two-step process: First to Griswold via Elliott in 1930, and then to 32 after 16 months. The last extension brought the route of the original north-south route of IA 100 back into the primary system.
(Roadgeeking and Philosophy: A Course in Applied Metaphysics, coming to a classroom near you!)