In a deep review of the online legal descriptions of Iowa highways, I’ve noticed some quirks in the conventions. A road will often connect or start at/with “an unnamed street”, but in each town that street clearly has a name. Older route descriptions have more information than newer ones. The weird thing is when streets are named, but according to modern maps, that street name does not exist.
One mass renaming that’s known for sure is Denison, which got rid of all its names for numbered streets and avenues.
But there are other cases. Take Earlham, for example. In 1960, the state set IA 232 “Commencing at the intersection of Chestnut Street and Iowa Street; thence northerly on Chestnut Street to the north corporation line.” But there is no Iowa Street in Earlham (PDF). For that matter, there’s no Chestnut Street, but Chestnut Avenue.
The same thing happens in Sully. From at least May 5, 1942, to June 18, 1975, IA 225 went downtown.
Beginning on Fourth Street at the west line of Main Street; thence east on Fourth Street to Park Street; thence north on Park Street to First Street; thence east on First Street to the east corporation line.
But today Sully doesn’t have a Main Street, or a Park Street. All the east-west roads are numbered streets and the north-south roads are numbered avenues.
This certainly makes it more difficult to ascertain where those old endpoints were, even in a place with as few streets as Alta Vista, where the end of IA 289 in 1980 was “739 feet south of the intersection of Main Street and Water Street” and neither Main Street nor Water Street are on the map today.
So, what gives?