Arnold Garson of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative wrote a Substack post last week about how the Iowa Great Lakes almost didn’t figure in to the state of Iowa. His writeup touches on the paired-states issue before the Civil War (slave state Florida, free state Iowa; slave state Texas, free state Wisconsin) and how the Des Moines Register promoted and covered the region in the 20th century.
The eagle-eyed reader will spot an uncredited map in the piece. That map would be from a page on this very website created more than 15 years ago about the different proposed Iowa borders.