{"id":12822,"date":"2022-06-29T10:00:13","date_gmt":"2022-06-29T15:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/?p=12822"},"modified":"2022-06-28T16:04:52","modified_gmt":"2022-06-28T21:04:52","slug":"iowas-1920-highway-system-ia-48-a-highway-of-theseus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/2022\/06\/iowas-1920-highway-system-ia-48-a-highway-of-theseus\/","title":{"rendered":"Iowa\u2019s 1920 highway system: IA 48, a Highway of Theseus"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nAugust 23, 2019:<\/strong> The current Essex school, which opened in 1970, is at the southwest corner of town. A vacated portion of original IA 48, an extension of South Avenue, ran through part of the building’s footprint and across home plate of the softball diamond.<\/em><\/p>\n

IA 48 runs from Shenandoah to Red Oak<\/a>, as it did in 1920, and now also goes north to US 6, but the original route has next to nothing in common with what you’d drive today.<\/p>\n

For about five years (1926-31), IA 48 also went south from Shenandoah to the Missouri state line, only to have IA 4 replace that part. After a short stint as IA 73 (II) in 1934, that road became US 59.<\/p>\n

The 1920 route started in Shenandoah, southeast of downtown. A little more than a decade later, it ran on Sheridan Street through downtown of\u00a0the largest non-county-seat city in Iowa’s southwest quadrant. It did that until being moved to the north side of the city in 1980.<\/p>\n

From there, it stairstepped to Essex until a diagonalization in 1930. The 1929 preliminary plan kept a corner at 190th Street and B Avenue.<\/p>\n

It is extremely easy to walk on the portion that carried the designation in both 1920 and 2020 \u2014 Forbes Street to the M41 junction in Essex. I believe the section-line skip on the north-south road has been there a while, given that the 1930 paving document showed structures on the other side of the railroad.<\/p>\n

From Essex to Red Oak, the original route is mostly gravel but has M41 as a farm-to-market designation. The tiny town of Coburg missed out twice, first being \u00be mile east and now 1\u00bd miles west of 48. At Red Oak, it overlapped IA 8 (now US 34) into downtown, ending probably at the courthouse or town square, until an early truncation.<\/p>\n

Its extension to US 32 was a two-step process: First to Griswold via Elliott in 1930, and then to 32 after 16 months. The last extension brought the route of the original north-south route of IA 100 back into the primary system.<\/p>\n

(Roadgeeking and Philosophy: A Course in Applied Metaphysics<\/a><\/em>, coming to a classroom near you!)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

August 23, 2019: The current Essex school, which opened in 1970, is at the southwest corner of town. A vacated portion of original IA 48, an extension of South Avenue, ran through part of the building’s footprint and across home … 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":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12822","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1920-highway-sytem"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12822","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=12822"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12822\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14176,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12822\/revisions\/14176"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12822"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12822"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/iowahighwayends.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12822"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}