The Waukon Standard has an interesting story about a connection to the town’s history. Prosper Waukon, the great-great-grandson of John Waukon, gave a presentation about his family’s history to the town in late July.
The Waukon lineage has a period of “Smith” as a last name because Native Americans were encouraged to change their names during implementation of the Dawes Act, the Standard reported.
Are you interested in seeing a high school sporting event in southwest Iowa this year? Better prepare in advance — or have a credit card handy.
The Western Iowa Conference, following the lead of the Hawkeye Ten Conference, will not take cash at the door, KMA reports. Both conferences are selling their tickets through Bound (formerly Varsity Bound), the website that also keeps statistics and postseason brackets. As far as I can tell, you have to navigate to the conference’s homepage there, then click “tickets,” then look for the game you want. This is the WIC’s page. Bound is a difficult and occasionally slow website to navigate, and methods for boys’ and girls’ sports may be different. Bound charges a fee for boys’ games.
The ticket issue applies to all sports. Audubon Athletic Director Sean Birks told KMA, “The hope is everybody either buys tickets ahead of time, scans their card at the door or has a punch card. That will help things be smoother. There will not be cash for walk-up sales.” That KMA article also says ticket prices are going up to $7 for football.
What happened to “This note is legal tender for all debts, public and private”?
The options of a punch card or credit card mitigates the issue for those who don’t bring/have smart phones, at least. Maybe I’m just a stick in the mud, but going cashless in situations like this is annoying. It also rules out giving your kid(s) the cash to get in separately.
In a Facebook post, North Tama said that it is also switching to Bound for tickets. Cash will be accepted at North Tama, but “some schools may only accept credit/debit cards at the gate,” the post says. All sports will be $6 except for volleyball at $5.
The issue is worse in college sports, where large schools have ditched any option except a smart phone. Iowa State says printed tickets and screenshots will not be allowed. If multiple tickets are under the same name, each person must have their own ISU ticket account, and tickets must be transferred. This pretty much destroys the idea of going there and holding up tickets to sell or fingers to buy tickets, which I suppose is an intended consequence. There won’t be a ticket stub memento. And of course, there will be perfectly working, full-bars data access and Wi-Fi at the stadium on game day, right? Right?
The ticket guide page at hawkeyesports.com says “all tickets must be presented on your mobile device.” Commenters on MGoBlog say this is the last year Michigan will print football tickets at all, and they’ve only been available to season ticket holders. Last year, screenshots of tickets were not accepted at Texas games.
If Taylor Swift fans can take on Ticketmaster, who do we need to take on college football’s ticketing scheme? (Oh, right, no one’s in charge of college football. I volunteer.)
UPDATE: Iowa State will not take cash anywhere at athletic events, according to a post at Cyclone Fanatic.
The 99 I experienced in Albuquerque in 2019 was a dry heat.
This is not a dry heat. Glory to corn sweat.
Cedar Rapids’ last 100-degree day was a decade ago next week (August 30, 2013).
For the second week in a row, I went to a Tama City Council meeting. Once again, the Lincoln Highway bridge was the subject. My Substack is ideally about Iowa history and highways, and right now, this is the story where both of those are involved.
As part of the conversion of US 30 between Ames and Nevada to a full freeway, the Iowa DOT plans to build an interchange on the west side of Nevada near the airport. The exit would not be completed until 2028.
A press release says a virtual presentation will be available starting around noon tomorrow through next Wednesday. At the time this blog post was published, there were no PDFs online. There will be an in-person meeting Tuesday at Nevada City Hall from 5 to 6:30.
The exit is at 610th Avenue/Airport Road by the Van Wall farm implement dealership. East-west roads to the northwest and southeast would be paved. The press release says “all interchanges” between Ames and the east side of Nevada would be closed; that should be all intersections. For the time being, the Sixth Street intersection on the south side of Nevada is being kept open even as an overpass is being built to eliminate the intersection with S14.
This has been in the works for a decade. The Nevada Journal reported in mid-2015 that the exit was on the five-year plan with completion in 2020. Then it was off the plan after a public outcry over closing the Sixth Street intersection. In mid-2020, the Nevada City Council voted to support the Airport Road interchange.
October 27, 2011: This intersection on US 30, the north end of old IA 234, has had several non-fatal crashes in the past few years, KCCI reports.
The now-seeming tradition of trouble with at-grade intersections on roads upgraded to four lanes in Iowa continues, this time in State Center.
Left turns from US 30 into State Center have resulted in multiple crashes, KCCI reported last month. The median of US 30 is not wide enough for a stop sign in the middle. See also this Marshalltown Times-Republican story.
The KCCI story says advance intersection warning signs will be coming to the location. I expect them to be similar to the ones at the Springville intersection on US 151.
It’s taken Springville a decade just to get an interchange on the five-year plan. State Center likely has the room for one, at the cost of at least the Wolf Country Customs building. Since this is a very flat area, a bridge over 30 would have to be entirely built up. That’s what happened with US 218 at the Youngville corner, so it’s not impossible.
See my story about Monday’s Tama City Council meeting on Substack.
July 24, 2019: This oversized US 6 shield was how the DOT initially signed US 6’s reroute onto I-80 on the east end of Council Bluffs. Straight ahead was IA 906, aka Kanesville Boulevard in the city.
The Iowa Department of Transportation turned IA 906 over to the city of Council Bluffs at its meeting last week.
The unsigned route was what had been US 6 from downtown Council Bluffs to I-80. The state turned over US 6 west of downtown, aka West Broadway, in 2016, although the exact date became a bit fungible. (The official route description says May 16. My blog post three weeks before that thought it would be May 1. Signs changed later.) Around the same time, but not all at the same time, the state turned over the entirety of IA 192.
The Kanesville Boulevard section of US 6 became IA 906 as US 6 was rerouted onto I-29 and I-80 to bypass Council Bluffs. Technically, US 6 follows I-29 only from I-480 to the east I-29/80 split (in the local lanes), and then shifts onto I-80 heading northeast.
On the other side of Council Bluffs, a DOT press release says that new lanes on I-29 are opening, requiring lane closures. The restriping will be complete Tuesday morning. The interstate has been detoured onto the newly built north-south frontage roads that intersect West Broadway.
July 9, 2023: Happy birthday!
We’re celebrating Traer’s 150th birthday this weekend, although many of the activities were back in June.
The schedule is on the WSF committee’s Facebook page.
My parents are grand marshals for tomorrow’s parade, which starts at 4.
For years I have tried to reconcile early 20th century maps of the area just east of Traer with the present alignment of IA 8. I knew that at least part of the diagonal heading east from Second Street did not exist until 1940. I thought I had a solution with a bridge connecting Second Street at the edge of Traer to the Chicago & North Western railroad depot, but that bridge was washed out in a flood in 1924, so at least part of the time the route had to be somewhere else.
It turns out that I was trying too hard.
Commission favors change in No. 58
The state highway commission has notified the county board of supervisors that it approves the change in the route of primary road No. 58 into Traer on the east, by which it is proposed to make about a half mile of new road from the Axon corner, east of town, through the Sieh farm, entering Traer on Second street instead of First street [emphasis added], passing the south side of the C.&N.W. station. This would eliminate two corners. The change to be effective must yet have the approval of the county board.
— Traer Star-Clipper, November 11, 1923
Second Street west of Main Street/US 63 is Traer’s business district, but there are some businesses to the east. That street connected most directly with the railroad depot, but dead-ended after the bridge. That’s where I kept running into problems. I kept wanting to bring the road back to Second Street once it got into the city limits. In my interpretation of the news item above, the 1920 routing of IA 58 can use First Street east of Main Street, because IA 59 went directly through the bulk of the business district on Second Street west of Main.
The change in the road would take another five years to come to fruition. The earliest cover in the Iowa State Highway Commission’s plans was signed by Chief Engineer Fred White on October 8, 1923, but there are three covers in all, the last dated December 12, 1927. (The dates aren’t always visible in the copies, but I lucked out.)
The plans went through a revision in 1925, following protests from F.O. Sieh. He was upset the road would cut diagonally through his farm, “the two divisions being ill-shaped for satisfactory farming purposes,” said the Star-Clipper. In April 1925, he and his son Henry proposed a slightly different alignment. In the revision, the road starts angling southeast at Coon Creek, instead of a few hundred feet east, past the depot and railroad tracks. This is the one that was used.
Note that F.O. Sieh’s name is misspelled in one place (between the blue lines), and correctly spelled in another (to the right of “Discarded plan”). The 1928-40 connection ran west from the center of section 11 to the railroad tracks, and today is the gravel road on the south side of the North Tama Athletic Complex.
The map above is a version of the map on my IA 8 page, which I also updated.
This is a lot of work for figuring out a mile of road, and that’s even with my obvious familiarity with this area. But it’s emblematic of what I run into all over the state as I try to figure out routings that many times were gone within a decade after they started. (See IA 31 at Smithland.) There’s no way I could have done this even in 2010.
(One detour during research in this saga: The Standard Oil Company bought a property at the intersection of First and Walnut streets, which is a block north of the business district, in September 1919 and planned a gas station there. In March 1921, the Traer Star-Clipper reported the company “made a mistake in the purchase of a site” and wanted somewhere else instead. By the end of 1930 Traer had six gas stations. Three were at the intersection of Main and First, a block north of IA 8’s west end. One, at the intersection of Second and Linn streets, presently houses the Traer Ambulance Service. One is the present Sinclair station on the north side of town, and the last on the south side of town was known as Gas-N-Grub in the late 1990s but has been closed for nearly two decades.)
