Jun 29

A southward expansion of West Des Moines

Posted on Thursday, June 29, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

West Des Moines has had its eyes on northeastern Madison and northwestern Warren counties for a while now, and the concept is taking a step into reality.

The city intends to build a bridge over I-35 between the IA 5 and Cumming exits to open up land for development, the Des Moines Register reports. A new Veterans Parkway, coming diagonally down from the city (the former Southwest Connector), would run between what is now 105th and 110th streets in a rural area. Then it would intersect an extension of Alice’s Road Grand Prairie Parkway in Section 3 of Madison County’s Lee Township, which right now is a spot on a dirt road between two farm fields. West Des Moines wants to build the parkway extension to open development and make way for a new Microsoft data center on the very western edge of Warren County, the Register says.

But in order to get clearance for construction, West Des Moines is engaging in a little expansion gamesmanship. An annexation request filed with the City Development Board and sent to Madison County shows WDM gets the area by taking the right-of-way for I-35 from the county line south 2½ miles, then stopping 50 feet before the city limits of Cumming. Cumming a while back annexed land covering the I-35 exit (except for the OLD exit right-of-way, which doesn’t match the ramps there now) and is probably very happy Iowa doesn’t have laws like Nebraska where one city can swallow another up if it’s big enough.

WDM’s annexation at the very edge of Warren County would leave a boxed-in gap of unincorporated area east of I-35. That’s where the 50-foot corridor comes in. That corridor, in the NW¼ of Section 7, doesn’t have a road now, but technically this doesn’t box in the land. However, the edge is either on the wrong side of I-35 or I-35 itself so it looks a bit silly.

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Jun 28

History of the Lincoln Highway in Wyoming

Posted on Wednesday, June 28, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

Wyoming Public Television made an hourlong documentary for the centennial of the Lincoln Highway in that state. It won an Emmy.

It’s entertaining and informative, and I’m going to link to the station’s page with the video although I first saw it on YouTube. (It was what inspired me to make a blog post last Thursday, and how I discovered things were bad.) Among the topics the documentary covers is why and how the route got signed through Medicine Bow, while I-80 passes far to the south today.

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Jun 27

Worst. Temp. Job. Ever.

Posted on Tuesday, June 27, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

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June 20, 2016: Hello, I must be going.

The Carroll Kmart was not in the large list of nationwide Kmart closures announced at the beginning of the year, but was included in a less-publicized round in spring. Two months after that, the Kmarts in Iowa City and Marshalltown were added to the list.

Unless more closures are announced, Iowa will have nine Kmarts at the end of 2017, half of what there were in 2015. Charles City and Oelwein will be the last ones left in the 319 area code. The store in Carroll has about three weeks left; Marshalltown’s will be open until September.

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When they say “Everything Must Go,” they aren’t kidding.

Posted in Iowa Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Worst. Temp. Job. Ever.
Jun 26

Blog solution. Maybe.

Posted on Monday, June 26, 2017, at 12:30 PM by Jeff

As you can see from editing of the last post, something Very Very Bad happened last week, causing quite a consternation. Through some digging, it appears my blog contracted the equivalent of a disease so bad and rare the doctor who discovers it gets to name it. (The ST:TNG episode “Genesis” got this exactly backwards.)

Yes, that is a Google page with FIVE search results, three of which are mine. After posting for help on the wordpress.org site (since this is not on WordPress itself), I was told it was a hosting thing. I did some more digging, specifically for “endurance-page-cache,” and found a couple of GitHub topics that pointed at the hosting service. Looking at the blog’s guts through an FTP site, I found a folder called “mu-plugins” that was not there when I backed up the blog in 2011. (YES I KNOW.) That folder had a creation date of June 21, 2017 — in the 72-hour period I had not touched the blog.

I deleted the mu-plugins folder. I clicked “Add Post.” IT WORKED.

This was the third thing in 10 days that blew up through no action on my part. Apple cut off iCloud in Mail for users of Mac OS 10.6.8 without warning (that’s not solved yet) and the SB Nation network blocked that OS’s version of Safari by switching to HTTPS (I had to switch to Chrome, and boy I miss Safari’s RSS functions).

I am going to hope that things are back to normal, even though hope is a dangerous thing. If this happens again and a solution is not so evident, I will create a static blog page and maybe do an every-week thing. That assumes everything else stays intact and (because tech stories require car analogies) I don’t find myself with a car suddenly unable to go into reverse.

Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off on Blog solution. Maybe.
Jun 24

Lincoln Highway: Sutherland, Nebraska

Posted on Saturday, June 24, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAugust 6, 2016: Mural on side of building on side of Lincoln Highway/US 30 in Sutherland, Nebraska, about 6 miles east of the Mountain/Central time zone boundary.

NOTE: I am getting a WordPress fatal error “undefined function current_action()” and until that gets fixed I cannot make more posts! The entire error line is “Fatal error: Call to undefined function current_action() in /home/iowahigh/public_html/blog/wp-content/mu-plugins/endurance-page-cache.php on line 280″

Posted in Highway Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Lincoln Highway: Sutherland, Nebraska
Jun 22

Lincoln Highway: Marshalltown, Iowa

Posted on Thursday, June 22, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


March 26, 2010: Closeup of the clock tower at the Marshall County Courthouse.

The Lincoln Highway’s original route through Marshall County went right through Marshalltown. It wasn’t relocated onto a straightaway until the end of 1947. The route through the city passed the Marshall County Courthouse on the north side. The courthouse, built with local limestone, was dedicated Nov. 18, 1886, and then extensively restored 90 years later.

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March 26, 2010: Facing north on S75.

When the cutoff opened, travelers on new 30 accidentally bypassed the city altogether, according to articles from the Times-Republican. The state responded by retaining most of the western portion of the bypassed route and, to show it was related to 30, designated it IA 330. It stayed in the state system until the day after Christmas 1989, when 330 was rerouted north from the intersection above to Albion, leaving only a fraction of a mile running west from the intersection to E41.

Posted in Highway Miscellaneous, Iowa Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Lincoln Highway: Marshalltown, Iowa
Jun 21

Lincoln Highway: Jefferson, Iowa

Posted on Wednesday, June 21, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

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May 15, 2011: The Greene County Courthouse, as seen from the Lincoln Highway (above) and looking east on the Lincoln Highway from the Mahanay Memorial Carillon Tower (below).

Half a century plus one year after the Mahanay Memorial bell tower was erected in downtown Jefferson, the tower’s bells have been restored to full working order.

Greene County was the first county to pave the Lincoln Highway in Iowa (PDF). When the US highway system was designated, Greene County had the southernmost paved road in the western third of the state.

The Lincoln Highway convention tour stops in Jefferson today.

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Jun 20

Lincoln Highway: Williamstown, Ohio

Posted on Tuesday, June 20, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

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October 3, 2013: Intersection of the Lincoln Highway and US 68, Williamstown, Ohio.

A significant stretch of the Lincoln Highway in Ohio was signed as US 30 as recently as the beginning of the 21st Century. The highway was upgraded to four lanes between Ontario and a point east of I-75 in two stages. For much more see Sandor Gulyas’ page.

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Jun 19

The Lincoln Highway, as previously seen here

Posted on Monday, June 19, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


July 6, 2013: Youngville Station at the intersection of US 30/218 in Benton County. Over multiple days, I traveled the then-newly-signed Lincoln Highway Historic Byway across Iowa for its 100th birthday.

Since this week is the Lincoln Highway Association’s annual convention, this year in Denison, I thought I’d pull out previous blog posts related to the historic transcontinental route. Mostly, it’s for the photos.

Posted in Highway Miscellaneous, Iowa Miscellaneous | Comments Off on The Lincoln Highway, as previously seen here
Jun 16

Bonus: E is for Elma

Posted on Friday, June 16, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


August 4, 2015: Some of the windows at Elma Elementary aren’t “windows” at all; they have classical artwork and inspirational quotes on them (detailed below).

A decade ago, the Howard-Winneshiek school district was the second-largest in the state by area with one high school (in Cresco, although the sports teams are called Crestwood), but there were three other sites students attended: Elma, Lime Springs, and Ridgeway. But an enrollment drop of 300 students over that time (and, as always, tight state funding) led the district to close all three locations.

Ridgeway was the first to go, in 2009. It is now home to the weirdest post-school use of a building in Iowa: a shrimp farm.

Then closures of Elma and Lime Springs happened a year apart, in 2014 and 2015. About the same time, Howard-Winneshiek ended an agreement with Riceville to let Riceville’s buses into the edges of the district. Looking at a map, you can infer why: Elma is much closer to Riceville than Cresco.


“Only the flint of a man’s mind can strike fire in music.” — Beethoven

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