Jun 26

Blog solution. Maybe.

Posted on Monday, June 26, 2017, at 12:30 PM by Jeff

As you can see from editing of the last post, something Very Very Bad happened last week, causing quite a consternation. Through some digging, it appears my blog contracted the equivalent of a disease so bad and rare the doctor who discovers it gets to name it. (The ST:TNG episode “Genesis” got this exactly backwards.)

Yes, that is a Google page with FIVE search results, three of which are mine. After posting for help on the wordpress.org site (since this is not on WordPress itself), I was told it was a hosting thing. I did some more digging, specifically for “endurance-page-cache,” and found a couple of GitHub topics that pointed at the hosting service. Looking at the blog’s guts through an FTP site, I found a folder called “mu-plugins” that was not there when I backed up the blog in 2011. (YES I KNOW.) That folder had a creation date of June 21, 2017 — in the 72-hour period I had not touched the blog.

I deleted the mu-plugins folder. I clicked “Add Post.” IT WORKED.

This was the third thing in 10 days that blew up through no action on my part. Apple cut off iCloud in Mail for users of Mac OS 10.6.8 without warning (that’s not solved yet) and the SB Nation network blocked that OS’s version of Safari by switching to HTTPS (I had to switch to Chrome, and boy I miss Safari’s RSS functions).

I am going to hope that things are back to normal, even though hope is a dangerous thing. If this happens again and a solution is not so evident, I will create a static blog page and maybe do an every-week thing. That assumes everything else stays intact and (because tech stories require car analogies) I don’t find myself with a car suddenly unable to go into reverse.

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Jun 24

Lincoln Highway: Sutherland, Nebraska

Posted on Saturday, June 24, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAAugust 6, 2016: Mural on side of building on side of Lincoln Highway/US 30 in Sutherland, Nebraska, about 6 miles east of the Mountain/Central time zone boundary.

NOTE: I am getting a WordPress fatal error “undefined function current_action()” and until that gets fixed I cannot make more posts! The entire error line is “Fatal error: Call to undefined function current_action() in /home/iowahigh/public_html/blog/wp-content/mu-plugins/endurance-page-cache.php on line 280″

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Jun 22

Lincoln Highway: Marshalltown, Iowa

Posted on Thursday, June 22, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


March 26, 2010: Closeup of the clock tower at the Marshall County Courthouse.

The Lincoln Highway’s original route through Marshall County went right through Marshalltown. It wasn’t relocated onto a straightaway until the end of 1947. The route through the city passed the Marshall County Courthouse on the north side. The courthouse, built with local limestone, was dedicated Nov. 18, 1886, and then extensively restored 90 years later.

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March 26, 2010: Facing north on S75.

When the cutoff opened, travelers on new 30 accidentally bypassed the city altogether, according to articles from the Times-Republican. The state responded by retaining most of the western portion of the bypassed route and, to show it was related to 30, designated it IA 330. It stayed in the state system until the day after Christmas 1989, when 330 was rerouted north from the intersection above to Albion, leaving only a fraction of a mile running west from the intersection to E41.

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Jun 21

Lincoln Highway: Jefferson, Iowa

Posted on Wednesday, June 21, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

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May 15, 2011: The Greene County Courthouse, as seen from the Lincoln Highway (above) and looking east on the Lincoln Highway from the Mahanay Memorial Carillon Tower (below).

Half a century plus one year after the Mahanay Memorial bell tower was erected in downtown Jefferson, the tower’s bells have been restored to full working order.

Greene County was the first county to pave the Lincoln Highway in Iowa (PDF). When the US highway system was designated, Greene County had the southernmost paved road in the western third of the state.

The Lincoln Highway convention tour stops in Jefferson today.

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Jun 20

Lincoln Highway: Williamstown, Ohio

Posted on Tuesday, June 20, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

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October 3, 2013: Intersection of the Lincoln Highway and US 68, Williamstown, Ohio.

A significant stretch of the Lincoln Highway in Ohio was signed as US 30 as recently as the beginning of the 21st Century. The highway was upgraded to four lanes between Ontario and a point east of I-75 in two stages. For much more see Sandor Gulyas’ page.

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Jun 19

The Lincoln Highway, as previously seen here

Posted on Monday, June 19, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


July 6, 2013: Youngville Station at the intersection of US 30/218 in Benton County. Over multiple days, I traveled the then-newly-signed Lincoln Highway Historic Byway across Iowa for its 100th birthday.

Since this week is the Lincoln Highway Association’s annual convention, this year in Denison, I thought I’d pull out previous blog posts related to the historic transcontinental route. Mostly, it’s for the photos.

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Jun 16

Bonus: E is for Elma

Posted on Friday, June 16, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


August 4, 2015: Some of the windows at Elma Elementary aren’t “windows” at all; they have classical artwork and inspirational quotes on them (detailed below).

A decade ago, the Howard-Winneshiek school district was the second-largest in the state by area with one high school (in Cresco, although the sports teams are called Crestwood), but there were three other sites students attended: Elma, Lime Springs, and Ridgeway. But an enrollment drop of 300 students over that time (and, as always, tight state funding) led the district to close all three locations.

Ridgeway was the first to go, in 2009. It is now home to the weirdest post-school use of a building in Iowa: a shrimp farm.

Then closures of Elma and Lime Springs happened a year apart, in 2014 and 2015. About the same time, Howard-Winneshiek ended an agreement with Riceville to let Riceville’s buses into the edges of the district. Looking at a map, you can infer why: Elma is much closer to Riceville than Cresco.


“Only the flint of a man’s mind can strike fire in music.” — Beethoven

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Jun 15

Dysart legalizes chickens

Posted on Thursday, June 15, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

By votes of 4-0, 3-2, and 3-2, the Dysart City Council passed three readings of an ordinance allowing residents to keep chickens inside city limits. Because when chickens are outlawed, only outlaws will have chickens.

Now, will this get hipsters to flock to Dysart, or will residents fly the coop? Such ordinances aren’t quite as rare as hen’s teeth anymore. Davenport legalized chickens earlier this year; Marion did it a year ago. An ordinance has been on the books in Cedar Rapids since 2010. But many cities, including Waverly but NOT Des Moines, ban roosters, so if there are any cocks of the walk in those city limits someone better cry fowl.

(Why yes, this was totally a cheep excuse for a pun post.)

I found out about this on May 10, the day of the third reading, but the city was late in posting the minutes and the Dysart Reporter‘s website didn’t have anything.
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Jun 14

I-380 construction will split travel lanes

Posted on Wednesday, June 14, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff

While traveling in Kentucky last year, I encountered a road construction phenomenon I haven’t seen often, if at all. While a rural interstate was being expanded to three lanes in each direction, an on-site detour had one lane of traffic move across the median while the other remained on the correct side. This split the lanes of travel (and in one case, meant no exit) but maintained two lanes in each direction. This is different than how it usually goes in Iowa; we get one-lane head-to-head traffic on one side while the other roadbed is torn up.

The split-lane method is going to be used in Cedar Rapids this summer. Bridges for I-380 are going to get an overlay, the Gazette reports, and that means some shuffling is needed to maintain three lanes in each direction. The southbound bridge will have four lanes squeezed on it, three southbound and one northbound. The reverse will happen next year.

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Jun 13

The end of the Marathon to Marathon

Posted on Tuesday, June 13, 2017, at 10:00 AM by Jeff


July 23, 2009: Welcome sign for Marathon at the south end of former IA 390.

The Marathon to Marathon has become the latest casualty of an aging and depopulating rural Iowa. The last race was last weekend.

While it may sound dramatic to describe the end of a 22-year event that way, it is none the less true. Its demise is summed up in this quote in the Sioux City Journal* article:

“When we all started, we were all in our 40s and low 50s, and now we are in our mid-60s, 70s and I had a committee of 15 to 16 people and now we are down to 6 to 8. We had young families with kids so it wasn’t any problem getting help, but families moved away … It’s a small town to start with, we just have run out of volunteers to be real honest with you.”

“We have run out of volunteers.” That is the scariest sentence one can say or read when it comes to community cohesiveness and social infrastructure. (Why yes, I am finally getting around to reading Bowling Alone, but I was waving a flag on this more than a decade ago.)

As much as they hate to admit it, the Baby Boomers are getting old. The 40-somethings of the mid-1990s are now the 60-somethings of the late 2010s, and a sufficient replacement cohort isn’t there. And I do mean literally not there; Laurens-Marathon High School just graduated its last class because of declining enrollment.

There’s any number of events/groups/what-have-you across Iowa — across rural America — that simply stopped for lack of new blood. (I think of the Amity Ice Cream Social, although it’s come back in a slightly different form.) Now, the Marathon to Marathon is one of them.

*I needed to blog about this ASAP, because the SCJ and all the Lee papers are getting a redesign “to emphasize mobile platforms” Wednesday and the only question is how horrible it will be.

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