Jan 16

Seymour tornado recovery moving steadily

Posted on Tuesday, January 16, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Seymour students displaced by a March tornado that severely damaged the school may be back in the school building in a few weeks, Iowa Public Radio reported at the beginning of the month. Elementary students are already back, which is good; the rest are in a former nursing home.

The Seymour girls’ basketball team is playing “home” games in Centerville, KCCI reported earlier this month. The Warriorettes were still undefeated through last Friday, when Ankeny Christian Academy forfeited.

The school’s website announced it was seeking bids on building “two gymnasiums, a stage, music instructional spaces, locker rooms, fitness area, with support and storage spaces.” The Depression-era gym was too damaged to remain. An elevator will be attached to the original school building. The meeting on those bids was Monday.

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Jan 15

Crossroads Sears doomed

Posted on Monday, January 15, 2018, at 10:20 AM by Jeff

Another original anchor of Crossroads Mall in Waterloo is biting the dust. This time it’s Sears, reported earlier this month (Courier, KWWL, KCRG), following J.C. Penney in 2015. Crossroads has been able to replace the Penney’s with an At Home, but now what?

This was “our” Sears. I think most if not every major appliance we got for decades came from this place. (Movable dishwashers are NOT easy to find.) The vacuum that died last month — one old enough it was still made from quality — was from the Crossroads Sears.

KWWL and the official closings list also mention that two Kmarts will be closing, in Red Oak and Urbandale. The former is the only big-box retailer in Montgomery County; the nearest Wal-Mart is in Shenandoah. There will be 10 Kmarts left in the entire state of Iowa, after three closed in 2017.

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Jan 12

Original Dunkerton school to be replaced

Posted on Friday, January 12, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

May 14, 2010: The Dunkerton school was a short distance from anything in town when it was built in 1921, but development has moved southward since. Photo slightly out of focus from old camera.

The oldest part of the Dunkerton school complex will be replaced starting this summer, the Waterloo Courier reports (link from Globe Gazette reprint). Interior furnishings will be sold off before demolition begins. A new addition will be built on the same spot.

There is a newer addition to the 1921 school’s south, but otherwise it should be easy enough to separate the rest of the old building from everything else, judging by aerial photos.

A Courier story shortly before the bond issue vote noted that this building isn’t being used much after a 2008 tornado caused enough damage that any renovations would require bringing the whole building up to code.

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Jan 11

4-H Schoolhouse Museum moves

Posted on Thursday, January 11, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

September 11, 2014: “Birthplace of the 4-H Club Emblem” marker at the schoolhouse museum in Clarion.

More than a century after the 4-H Emblem was born in Wright County, Iowa, the museum celebrating it has been moved — but not too far.

The one-room school where the county superintendent came up with the idea was bought and restored in the 1950s. It was opened as a museum in Gazebo Park in Clarion, two blocks from the Wright County Courthouse and a few hundred feet from the dead center of Wright County itself (the intersection of IA 3 and R38/Madison Avenue).

The building was moved to the west edge of Clarion with the Heartland Museum at the end of December, the Eagle Grove Eagle reports.

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Jan 10

HMS will close Hartley Elementary

Posted on Wednesday, January 10, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

After three bond referendums failed — two making a majority but missing a supermajority by a handful of votes — the HMS school district intends to close the district’s oldest building in 2019, KIWA Radio reports. That would be Hartley Elementary, housed in a Depression-era building once intended for K-12.

HMS said this would happen if the bond issue failed, and it would have happened if the bond issue had succeeded. The good news is that Hartley will still have the high school. Grades 7 to 12 will be in Hartley and the rest in Sanborn, the radio station said.

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Jan 09

It’s the state of Iowa’s fault, again

Posted on Tuesday, January 9, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

If Iowa State hadn’t beaten Oklahoma, the Sooners would have gone undefeated. The College Football Playoff semifinals would have been (1) Oklahoma vs. (4) Alabama and (2) Clemson vs. (3) Georgia. We might not have avoided an all-SEC final, but the games would have been different.

If Iowa hadn’t taken Ohio State to the woodshed, the CFP likely would have taken the Big Ten champion and left out Alabama, who didn’t win its division let alone its conference. (Whether the Big Ten would have scored in the CFP for the first time in three years is a different question.)

So for the second time in the 2010s, Alabama has a national championship because a team in Iowa won a game it shouldn’t have.

Strong with the Dark Side, Lord Saban is.

(Be thankful you are not a Georgia Bulldogs/Atlanta Falcons fan who loved “La La Land,” because…oof.)

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Jan 08

20th anniversary of Iowa Highways Page

Posted on Monday, January 8, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

The Iowa Highways Page is 20 years old today. I stumbled on it about two years after Jason Hancock set it up. Since then, he and I have done lots of coordination and research to make our sites complementary and provide the best information we can to those interested in Iowa highways.


(not mine)
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Jan 05

Correction on the (perceived) misalignment of IA 395

Posted on Friday, January 5, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

On state maps starting with the 1976 redesign, it looks like IA 395 runs as an east-west route. Because it was turned over in 1983, there was no readily available information on whether that was the case. Now, with more access to maps of the time, and DOT route logs, the answer is definitive: IA 395 was always a north-south route, connecting Melbourne to IA 330.

Melbourne had it worse off than other towns peripherally along state routes. It lost a road from the west, IA 235, in 1935 when construction on the IA 88 diagonal began. The diagonal had no direct connection to downtown Melbourne; it grazed the northwest corner.

Sometime after the diagonal (renumbered IA 64 in 1939) was finished, and before 1943, Melbourne excluded some land from the city, north of the railroad right-of-way. That enabled the town to qualify for its own spur route. The story about the loophole Melbourne and other communities exploited will be explored in a later blog post.

 1980 Marshall County map

That’s the way the route looked from 1948 until a bit after the First Great Decommissioning. The segment inside the city was turned over in 1980, but the fraction of a mile from the overpass to IA 330 remained in the state system for a few more years. With the route gone, there is no need on the state map anymore to split the mileage there, so IA 330 is an unbroken 20 miles from US 65 to US 30. However, there is one vital part of Melbourne along the diagonal — the only pit stop between Bondurant and either Albion or IA 14 (depending on your route).

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Jan 04

Original Riverside (Oakland) school complex sold

Posted on Thursday, January 4, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

After a delayed opening of an all-new Riverside school complex on the outskirts of Oakland (the south US 6/59 junction), the property in the city was left empty. At the end of December, the Council Bluffs Nonpareil reported that the school district intends to sell the entire thing, including the old athletic fields, to brothers who want to open the gym, shop, and later school rooms to the community. The oldest part could be turned into affordable housing, the article says.

(And yes, it bothers me to no end that the “Riverside” district has no connection to Riverside, Iowa, nor does it tell someone at first glance where it is in the state — especially since it’s not on a border river. The West Nishnabotna flows past Oakland, Carson, and Macedonia, the towns that make up Riverside.)

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Jan 03

Population projection: Utah has babies and Iowa doesn’t

Posted on Wednesday, January 3, 2018, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERASeptember 28, 2015: Clayton, Iowa, along the Mississippi River, has no children living in city limits, according to census numbers — adding the atmosphere of a micro-version of “Children of Men” to this photo of a playground there. Buck Grove, near Denison, has the same problem — a playground with no children to enjoy it.

Utah is virtually guaranteed to pass Iowa in population in the 2020 census, based on a recent estimate that the former gained nearly four times the population of the latter in fiscal 2016. I noticed this possibility when the numbers were released last year, and there’s no sign of either trend changing. In fact, the switch could happen in the fiscal 2017 estimates released at the end of 2018.

To inadvertently hammer the point home, there’s something from each state’s largest newspaper from December that encapsulate what’s going on:

Utah has the nation’s third fastest growth rate. Why? Babies. Lots of babies. (Salt Lake Tribune)

Childless Iowa: More communities left with few, if any, kids (Des Moines Register)

In one of my last columns for the Iowa State Daily, in 2004, I wrote:

In the next 10 to 20 years, the personal support infrastructure that built small-town Iowa is going to collapse. One day, someone is going to die, no one who coordinated funeral potlucks for the past 25 years will be able to help, and there won’t be any younger people to take their place.

On the one hand, I might have been aggressive on that estimate. On the other hand, the Marathon to Marathon — an example of the type of thing that relies on a solid group of volunteers — ended 13 years later.

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