OK, that’s probably not what this purveyor of Scandinavian delicacies in Oakland NE intends, but after reading the story, isn’t that something certain people would think about? Would this be something for Decorah (the Norwegian capital of Iowa) or Stanton (the Swedish capital of Iowa) to match?
(Governor Branstad Reynolds! We must not allow a mail-order-lutefisk gap!)
September 26, 2016: In March 2010, the Volga post office was “temporarily closed”. Now, there are these cluster boxes outside, which often signal the town’s post office is gone for good, but the letters are still on the building clear as day and the post office has hours listed on the USPS site.
Here are the towns in Iowa that I first set wheel in this year.
* = City limits are on the highway, so it’s not strictly the first time, but this time I went into town.
**The Boone and Scenic Valley Railroad goes to Fraser, but this was the first time either by car or in the 21st century.
That’s a sizable list, covering 32 new cities and 7 more-extensive visits in 23 counties. After that one-day September trip, on a gorgeous day, I was ready for…
THE FINAL COUNTDOWN.
(This would be way better for ISU to play at the start of the fourth quarter than “Sweet Caroline.”)
July 14, 2015: Completion of the four-lane US 20 across Iowa involves detouring the route through Galva. Detoured traffic will take a left while the road ahead will be closed. Photo is at the south end of old IA 328.
The plan to close US 20 for two consecutive years has been dropped in favor of restoring the regular route over the winter, the Sioux City Journal reports. The detour will be restored in the spring to continue upgrading the final stretch of 20 to four lanes.
The Tama County Museum has an open house today for the remembrance of the 75th anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor. William Kvidera of Tama County was lost on the USS Oklahoma. His body was never recovered.
By the end of 2018, the beginning of World War II will be closer, time-wise, to the end of the Civil War.
Related: Pearl Harbor chaplain’s remains coming back to Iowa
August 4, 2015: After IA 122/old US 18 was turned over, Rudd remained a city “on” the Iowa highway system because the four-lane is still within the city limits.
I’ve sporadically mentioned my resolution to visit all 944 existing incorporated cities in Iowa (soon to be 943) with a start date of my first big trip for Iowa Highway Ends pictures in 2003. I thought I’d take a couple blog posts to go through where I’ve been through the last three years or so in pursuit of this goal.
But first, there’s a question that had to be answered before I knew where I was going: How many towns will I have reached by virtue of traveling every mile of every state-maintained road in Iowa?
The 2014 average annual daily traffic map, which only shows towns on state-maintained roads, has 501 towns on it. The 2015 highways-only map (PDF) has 560 towns on it. One is playing very tight with the rules, one is playing very loose, and the real number is closer to the former. Comparing the individual city maps to the 2015 map finds some exceptions, both obscure (Gowrie) and obvious (Gilbert), but the 2014 is missing some that should be there (Luana, Radcliffe). There are a few towns that used to be on spur routes that have annexed land up to a highway (Manilla, Ocheyedan), but you don’t think of them as being “on” it.
There are about 100 more cities that were on the map before the Second Great Decommissioning of 2003. They can be seen on this 2002 vehicular traffic map. That leaves about 30 percent or so of Iowa’s incorporated places that haven’t recently been on a state-maintained road and aren’t immediately adjacent to one.
If the city limits touch the highway, even running down the centerline, I consider that sufficient, although I may have returned in the past few years for a more in-depth pass. Since I spent most of 2003-13 going after highways and recently deceased highways, that 30 percent would be the hardest to get.
It turns out that I’ll also have set wheel through the dozen places in Iowa that have disincorporated since 1985, too, or at least visited 11 and skimmed by one.
After a bond issue to build a single-site school for the Highland district failed, continued declining enrollment may force Ainsworth Elementary school to be closed, KCRG reports.
Meanwhile, Waukee is planning its NINTH elementary school, which is more than Tama and Grundy counties have combined. “Radiant” will open in fall 2019 — not the worst name, since there is a connection to the area’s past, but it cries out to put Some Pig Elementary, Terrific Elementary, and Humble Elementary next on the list.
September 26, 2016: Around Iowa, this is an unusual sight: A stoplight at the intersection of two county roads with nothing around. It’s at E34 (County Home Road) and W6E (Center Point Road) in Linn County.
Traditionally, the state of Iowa and municipalities stay away from putting stoplights on rural roads. (It’s part of what the US 65/IA 330 kerfuffle is about.) But, in the semi-recent past, the southeast corner of the E34/W6E intersection was incorporated into the suburb of Robins, making it less rural. Per Google Maps Street View, the stoplight was put up between mid-2009 and early 2012; a church to the south that opened in 2011 with a biiiig parking lot may have been a factor in the intersection upgrade as well. A gas station at the I-380 E34 exit, the first building at the interchange, is less than a year old.
You can see Robins’ very janky north city limits on the PDF map here. (Note also that much of the west city limits cling to the right-of-way on I-380 except for that one spot.) While the core of Robins is 2½ to 3 miles southeast of this corner, the city is boxed in on the south, making sprawl in this direction inevitable. A special census completed this year pushed it above Tipton and Rock Valley in population.
On Nov. 30, 1988, Iowa State had an all-time record with 100 more wins than Kansas State, and 20 more wins in its series against Kansas State. That day, “Futility U” introduced its new head coach, Bill Snyder, Iowa’s offensive coordinator for the past decade.
Twenty-eight years (and a deposed Prince) later, KSU is now in an exact tie with ISU at 516 wins apiece. (That’s an adjusted number; other standings will show one more win for ISU, at least until/unless KSU wins one of its last two games.)
The Purple Wizard celebrated (well, that might be too strong a word) his 200th career victory Saturday against Kansas. Snyder has beaten Iowa State and Kansas 21 times each; the only other opponents in double-digits are Missouri and Oklahoma State. He’s pulled the Wildcats within two games of tying their all-time series with the Cyclones; the closest comparable collapse is Minnesota going from 18 games up on Wisconsin at the end of the 1994 season to a tie as of Saturday.
Iowa State’s season is over, and the Cyclones are guaranteed to fall below the Wildcats in all-time win percentage, supplanting them as the fourth-worst power-conference school and second-worst public power-conference school (Indiana). Overall, a dozen power-conference teams have all-time percentages below .500; Kansas joined the list in the early 2010s but thanks to more games played overall still has far more wins than Kansas State.
Although the DOT didn’t quite get the road open before Thanksgiving, there’s going to be a ribbon-cutting for the IA 100 extension from Edgewood Road to Covington Road (old IA 94) Saturday at 1 PM. The road will not open to vehicle traffic then, but will sometime before Christmas.
In the past month, visible progress has been made on the rest of the IA 100 extension, including demolition of the 80th Street bridge over US 30/218 (on Sunday, the LGS pointing to eastbound 30 still stood, without any road around it).
There’s one side project that hasn’t been added to any lists as far as I know, but is something that should be looked at immediately: Paving E Avenue (County Road E48) between the bypass and Atkins. Atkins has doubled in population in 20 years and there is a lot of residential development on the east side of town; it makes sense that commuters heading to the Collins Road area would want to be able to drive straight east and pick up the bypass.
The Des Moines Register wrote about the failure of the consolidation vote between Odebolt-Arthur and Battle Creek-Ida Grove. Fear of an eventual closure of the school in Odebolt — the “OA” part would be about a third of the new district, with “BCIG” having the majority — was a major cause.
I agree with David Else, who went across the state with his wife photographing now-closed school buildings across the state, saying that such division may be a precursor of things to come. Consider what happened in Gladbrook-Reinbeck the past year, and the financial difficulties that caused the state to nuke the Farragut school district, and Iowa Falls telling Alden it was ending the two-way sharing there, and there’s a good argument it’s happening already.
