There is a tiny parcel of the Marshalltown school district, half a square mile, that isn’t directly connected to the rest of the district. It is connected via what, in the Iowa legislative redistricting process, is called “point contiguity” — that is, the parcels meet at a junction but do not have a land connection. That’s not allowed in either redistricting or school district boundary drawing.
How did it get there, then? It was grandfathered in from 1946.
The middle feature circled in blue is Marietta No. 4 school, one of thousands of such township schools once peppered methodically across the state. The school was discontinued in 1946, which was a formality, as the Times-Republican article about it reported it had not been active for a decade. The territory was divided between the Albion and Lamoille districts.
Lamoille later merged with State Center, and Albion merged with Marshalltown. The north half of the southwest quarter of Section 23 — the rectangle with “J.T. Packer” — went with Albion to Marshalltown, although it’s surrounded by State Center/West Marshall territory.
While looking in to that, I found out a few more things about the area that has changed in the past decade.
- Marietta became a ghost town after losing the courthouse to Marshalltown in 1859. It never had the city grid seen in the 1885 plat book. There used to be a large wooden marker in a field, that I unfortunately never got a picture of before it vanished. The only trace is on Google Street View from 2009, where we can see “Marietta, Iowa / First / Marshall County / Court House / [illegible]”. Note the land owned by Robert M. Timmons just to the north, namesake of Timmons Grove county park and campground.
- The Hartland Friends Church, the western circled site, was demolished in the 2013-14 school year, according to aerial photos. The Hixsite church, the eastern site, was demolished just last year, between August and November (aerial photos/Google Street View). Quakers are a part of Iowa history — Herbert Hoover was born a Quaker, and there’s William Penn University in Oskaloosa — and Marshall County “became the largest center of Norwegian Quakerism in the United States.”
- Albion, just north of Marietta, has renamed its annual festival the Rail-Trail Festival, after its previous name was related to the school building demolished in 2018. The “rail” is the Iowa River Railroad, which abandoned nearly its entire trackline in 2012 except for the segment between Ackley and an ethanol plant near US 20. The “trail” is the hope of converting the right-of-way into a bike path. IA 330 had an overpass above the railroad until 2002, when it was replaced with an at-grade crossing, and those gates have been removed.
- The IA 330 at-grade RRX just north of the E41/S75 junction, which in my experience has been awful for decades, finally got replaced last year!