Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

The McDonald’s at I-80 exit 46 in western Iowa closed permanently April 17. I found out first-hand, but it slipped my mind for about a month. It didn’t have great reviews on TripAdvisor, for whatever that’s worth.

The closure is surprising to me because it is the first fast food place on westbound I-80 after Stuart, which in turn has the first fast food on I-80 west of the Jordan Creek Parkway exit. That will slightly change in the mid-term when the Alice’s Road Grand Prairie Parkway exit gets developed, but still, that’s 75 (and now more) miles of interstate with only one exit for fast food.

A McDonald’s/Love’s opened in August 2014 at the Shelby exit, 12 miles west. That could have been a factor. Even so, that place plus the truck stop and Subway at Avoca are the only food places directly on the interstate between Council Bluffs and Stuart.

October 4, 2015: In this view of the Civil War soldier at top of the monument at Keokuk National Cemetery, it doesn’t look like he has a specific insignia. But that’s likely intentional, at least in part because he represents unknown soldiers buried there.

In an article published online a week ago but in print (at least the section in the Des Moines Register) Sunday, USA Today went after the existence of Confederate monuments across the country.

Although most of these monuments are in former Confederate states, they are also in border states that fought alongside the Union, such as Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia and Maryland; in Union states, including Massachusetts, Iowa and Pennsylvania; and in states that were mere territories in 1861, such as Montana, Arizona and Oklahoma.

Hold it. HOOOOOLLLDD IT. I am not going to say I’ve never seen a Confederate flag flying in Iowa, because I have. But to say Iowa has monuments sympathetic to the South is, as they might say in the 1860s, a scurrilous accusation.

A list of Confederate monuments on Wikipedia lists none in Iowa. In a comprehensive listing of Civil War monuments across Iowa, a majority are “Civil War Soldier” or “Veterans Monument/Memorial”. The word “Confederate” appears four times, two of which are captured cannons. A third is for POWs who died in transit to Rock Island. The fourth is for “Iowa’s Confederate General”, Sul Ross, who was born in Bentonsport the year before his family left for Texas. It is a rock with a plaque on it.

There is a site in Davis County, three rocks with plaques on them, marking “the northernmost point of incursion into Iowa by Confederate forces.” That’s a historical fact, not a glorification of anything.

So what monument, let alone monuments plural, could the article be referencing? One possibility is the monument at the veterans cemetery in Keokuk. A handful of Confederates are buried there, but there is nothing for them except the grave markers (and flags on Memorial Day). The “Find a Grave” website says, “The monument is a large granite obelisk topped with the figure of a Confederate soldier standing at parade rest.” However, multiple other sources indicate this has to be false.

• First and foremost, the monument was put up by the Woman’s Relief Corps, which is the auxiliary of the Grand Army of the Republic — the UNION side!
• The inscription says “To Our Unknown Dead”, nothing more specific.
• The official page for the Keokuk National Cemetery from the Department of Veterans Affairs says it’s a “Union soldier standing at parade rest.”
• The Winter 1955 issue of the Annals of Iowa, “Grave Markers at Keokuk,” says, “A monument to the other 48 [unknown soldiers] was erected by the Women’s Relief Corps in 1912 and shows a Union soldier, standing at parade rest, on the top of a stone shaft.”
• It’s unlikely there is any sort of insignia, because the manufacturers of Civil War monuments — who basically would have been carving these things en masse in the early 20th century because so many places wanted one — could sell to both sides merely by saying “this depicts a soldier”.

I feel comfortable in saying no carved Confederate statue or monument with flowery language to their war dead occupies a place of prominence in the state of Iowa. If USA Today‘s rationale for mentioning the state is Sul Ross’ rock or the Keokuk statue, that is the thinnest gruel imaginable.

November 21, 2012: Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad (second from left) helps cut the ribbon to open new US 20 between IA 4 and US 71. Also shown, center to right, are Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds, U.S. Rep. Steve King and Iowa DOT Director Paul Trombino. 

Today, Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad becomes Ambassador Branstad, on his way to China. He has been governor for one-eighth of the state’s lifetime and over half of mine. It won’t be until early April 2026 that the latter part of that statement changes.* He’s the longest-serving governor of any state in U.S. history.

This historic day is, as has been noted quite often, the introduction of Iowa’s first female governor. (Maybe Branstad should tack that onto his list of victories against Democrats … but then, Iowa has not yet elected one.) It’s also historic because it’s so rare for Iowa to lose its governor before the term is up.

It’s only happened four times, in fact. Three of them were because the governor had been elected to the Senate; the fourth was when Gov. William Beardsley was killed in a car accident. But only once out of those four times did the lieutenant governor become governor with more than 60 days of the term remaining — and that was back in 1877. The rarity has contributed to the intrigue about whether Reynolds can appoint a second-in-command (and if she does, and someone sues, then the attorney general’s office is supposed to defend the state, but Tom Miller’s opinion is what created this legal cloud and he’s already backed out of defending a different state law he disagreed with).

It’s the end of an era, again, in Iowa politics, and it wouldn’t have happened without the 2016 presidential election. The butterflies work in mysterious ways.

*The Gazette said today would be his 8169th day as governor; my spreadsheet says 8167. I suspect it has to do with the counting method.