{"id":10987,"date":"2019-08-21T10:00:41","date_gmt":"2019-08-21T15:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/?p=10987"},"modified":"2019-08-15T00:25:28","modified_gmt":"2019-08-15T05:25:28","slug":"re-evaluating-ottumwas-earliest-highways","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2019\/08\/re-evaluating-ottumwas-earliest-highways\/","title":{"rendered":"Re-evaluating Ottumwa’s earliest highways"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"OLYMPUS
\nApril 13, 2016:<\/strong> Northbound US 63 at one of the newest additions to Ottumwa’s highway chronology, a three-point roundabout with US 34. This is one of the very few places in Iowa a roundabout kind of makes sense.<\/em><\/p>\n

Microfilm research isn’t perfect. The best OCR-to-digital transformation of old microfilm still results in photographs looking like crap. And you can forget about color. If, say, a newspaper splurged on green-and-red trappings for Christmas, there’s no way to know about it from the microfilm save for a slightly different shade of gray.\u00a0But saving the physical copies is expensive, space-consuming, and limited to in-person visits.<\/p>\n

I was doing research for a different upcoming project that caused me to look back at what I did for Ottumwa’s highway chronology<\/a>. Since then, I got additional resources (namely Huebinger’s Map and Guide for Blue Grass Road<\/em>). And a hard squint at a copy of a microfilm map made me believe that I had either reversed or mis-dated “present” and “proposed” designations because the original was done in colored pencil.\u00a0(At the time of this writing, blueprints are unavailable for anything Ottumwa-specific pre-1968, and at least two filesets are blank pages.)<\/p>\n

So I killed the 1928 map and made two new ones: 1922<\/a> and 1932<\/a>. It spoiled the “maps on the 8s” theme of the page, but oh well. By splitting them up, I could portray earliest alignments of both the Blue Grass\/IA 8\/US 34 and the north-south road that was the Cedar Rapids, Ottumwa, and McGregor Trail and today lives on in reduced form as IA 13. There’s one change that I don’t know when it happened, but it’s drawn in as a dotted line.<\/p>\n

I also modified the 1938 and 1958 maps to delete Myrtle Street as a connection between Church and Jefferson on the south side of the river, because the highways met in a Y. The connection sliced through the middle of the present interchange. Myrtle could have been used as an unofficial connector, though.<\/p>\n

Adding the early maps allows me to illustrate that US 63 is on its fifth<\/em> bridge across the Des Moines River now, including two from the 1890s. I also was able to list a change that was buried in my notes. That just meant I already had an answer to a question I didn’t know I would ask. Thanks, me!<\/p>\n

(Feeling of self-satisfaction immediately negated by realization I wrote Albia where I meant Agency and it’s been that way on the page for a decade. \u2014 Ed.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

April 13, 2016: Northbound US 63 at one of the newest additions to Ottumwa’s highway chronology, a three-point roundabout with US 34. This is one of the very few places in Iowa a roundabout kind of makes sense. Microfilm research … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10987","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-maps"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10987","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10987"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10987\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11250,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10987\/revisions\/11250"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10987"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10987"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10987"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}