Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

I don’t know what possessed Cityview’s Jim Duncan to open up a story about food at the Meskwaki casino with a Lincoln Highway conspiracy theory, but it’s flat out incorrect. Duncan writes:

The Lincoln Highway’s course was only altered in one place — between Marshalltown and Tama. In 1955 the powers there moved it several miles north of its original course through the Meskwaki settlement. From 1918 till that move, the highway had delivered an economic boon to the tribe. … After the suspicious move, the tribe suffered.

The Lincoln Highway as an official auto trail ceased to exist when the federal route system was birthed in 1925-27. All subsequent changes in Iowa — of which there are more than a dozen — were to US 30, not the Lincoln per se. Nationally, the Lincoln Highway went through countless realignments in the 1910s and ’20s and was locked in a bitter dispute over its exact routing in western Utah.

When US 30 was rerouted to go straight west from Missouri Valley to Blair instead of into Council Bluffs in 1931, which right there is a major alteration in Iowa — the Lincoln Highway name still carried enough cachet that official LH posts were uprooted in the middle of the night and relocated.

But we don’t even have to go that far. If any alteration to US 30 is considered changing the Lincoln, Belle Plaine and Chelsea were bypassed in 1937, and that happened in Tama County!

Finally, a realignment during the Lincoln Highway era came after Marion lost the Linn County seat to Cedar Rapids in 1919, and the first numeral designation of IA 6 used Mount Vernon Road and bypassed Marion entirely.

(None of the above even counts an ancient change to the Lincoln that moved it to the south side of the settlement; the very first routing went into its heart and today is marked as a loop route. That may be where the 1918 reference came in, or that’s an additional error since the LH began in 1913.)