On Monday, in conjunction with Gladbrook’s Memorial Day service, the Tama County Freedom Rock was dedicated. It’s right beside the All Veterans Memorial. The rock was unveiled Dec. 20.
The front (side facing IA 96) is a procession of soldiers from the Civil War to the present day. The back honors the Meskwaki Code Talkers of World War II (many tribes, not just the Navajo, were involved in such activities).
Students walked out the doors of the Pottawattamie County town of Walnut for the last time last week. Next year it will be part of a fully consolidated AHSTW.
(The population on the town sign mentioned in the story is from 1980.)
The city of Walnut will take possession of the school building and will tear part of it down.
What’s notable in the summer 2016 reduction of Iowa school districts is that all three — Farragut, Prescott, and Walnut — will be losing/have lost their buildings as well.
Vin Scully recites the “Field of Dreams” speech.
People will come, Vin.
Vin Scully recites the most iconic speech from a baseball film ever. #HallofFameTourhttps://t.co/ci59idkKOW
— MLB (@MLB) May 26, 2016
The 511ia.com website now shows that IA 196 is closed until June 24. The road was closed this year in order to finish up shoulder work that was not done before Thanksgiving last year, once projected to open May 7, then the Friday before Memorial Day, and now almost to the end of the fiscal year.
When the road reopens it will be part of US 71.
May 28, 2012: Goldfield cemetery, Memorial Day.
Harmony High School graduated its last class on Sunday. The 21 seniors each received a $2,900 scholarship, reported the Burlington Hawk Eye (if that’s unavailable, AP version). The school distributed the money from two alumni estates. Juniors and sophomores were told they will get $2,450 each if going to community college in Burlington or Ottumwa.
Also last Sunday, Remsen-Union held its final graduation, as did Nishnabotna in Farragut.
Harmony’s last day was yesterday; Nishnabotna’s is today. Remsen-Union won’t dismiss until June 7.
July 21, 2012: The school is one of the very few buildings left in Moneta, barely on the west side of the O’Brien/Clay county line.
The tiny Moneta school district was caught in a tug of war between Hartley and Everly in the late 1950s and ended up split in two.
At the same time the Baby Boom was creating explosions in enrollment, one-room schools were dying by the dozens as reorganizations swept the state. The newly formed Hartley Community School District had 797 students in 1959-60, and 883 the next year, so many that junior high classes were held at the Legion Building. (Today, Hartley-Melvin-Sanborn has fewer than 650.)
Moneta High School’s last graduating class was in 1959. That July, O’Brien County objected to a planned merger between Everly and Moneta because it did not match that board’s vision for county-wide reorganization. At the time, county boards held some measure of veto power, and the state Department of Public Instruction granted the appeal. The merger was off, and 30 Moneta high-schoolers were divided between Hartley and Everly.
In November 1959, the county boards of education divided Moneta up, giving 60% of it to Everly. On April 12, 1960, Everly and that portion of Moneta approved consolidation. Residents of the 40% rump district voted to join Hartley Oct. 10, 1960, and the Moneta Consolidated School District ceased to exist July 1, 1961.
Moneta makes a one-paragraph appearance in The Only Dance In Iowa, which noted that the school building closed entirely in 1976 and the town disincorporated in 1996.
In another sign of the disruption of the old ways of life in the period, the Milwaukee Railroad announced plans to discontinue passenger service between Madison WI and Canton SD along the US 18 corridor. An outcry postponed the cancellation, but the last trains went through Jan. 4-5, 1960. In summer 1959, US 18 was rebuilt and widened through Hartley, replacing 18-foot-wide concrete from 1921, and a ribbon-cutting was held Oct. 9.
(All information from the Hartley Sentinel archives, including a banner headline to warm your small-town heart, “Free hams to be given in Hartley Saturday,” April 14, 1960.)
About eight years ago, I added an “Iowa border bridge timeline” into the Annex section. It has a bar chart of Iowa’s bridges across the Missouri and Mississippi rivers. At the time, I stopped the lines in 2010, knowing the new US 275/IA 92 bridge was going to open then.*
Now, with the I-74 bridge replacement included in the five-year plan — a step up from “real soon now”, and two steps from “eventually” — I can draw the timeline out to 2021. I’m going to treat the new I-74 spans as replacing their respective ones, rather than one new one. This is in part because the new bridge will be open in stages, with one old span scheduled to be closed around Thanksgiving 2019 and the other to stick around for a year longer.
*I know that there are no pictures for that new bridge yet on the site. The ones I have, from one visit, aren’t good enough.
June 19, 2015: The back of the Corwith school building.
The district dissolved at the end of last school year. Nearly all of CW’s students go to Lu Verne and grades 7-12 go to Algona.
(As I have said before, it is technically correct to say the “four-thousand-xth” district to close since 1950, but Iowa was shedding one-room schools by the hundreds each year until settling to 458 districts in 1965. To put it in a different context, Corwith-Wesley was the 122nd district to shutter in 50 years.)
April 17, 2016: The present Collins-Maxwell Elementary in Collins was built in the 1990s.
Although Collins-Maxwell and Baxter have shared sports for nearly three decades now, they have never done any integration beyond that. Now, attempts at talking about whole-grade sharing have broken down, and news coverage indicates animosities have cropped up that could tear Collins-Maxwell apart.
Last month, CM, whose enrollment has dropped 10 percent in the last decade, was told it needed to cut 10 percent out of salaries in next school year’s budget.
On May 11, according to the Tri-County Times, the boards appeared to be talking past each other. Baxter is on board with sharing (and would likely get the high school), but CM’s interim superintendent “reached out to nearby school districts to look at operational sharing.” He even proposed a regional high school, an idea that stands a snowball’s chance at the State Fair. CM is hedged in on the west and south by the fast-growing Ballard, North Polk, and Bondurant-Farrar districts, and on the north by the much larger Nevada district, which makes the difficulties CM is facing more stark.
And then things got testy. From a follow-up TCT article:
Blaming a vocal group in Maxwell for ego-centrism, Comegys said a group of community members in Collins now believes it’s time to make decisions that are best for its community. “I think Maxwell has made a bed for us, and we just can’t lie in it anymore.” Comegys added that there is a group of people in Collins with the resources, interest and desire to explore every legal option they have to if necessary to make the split from the school district.
Whoa.
There is indeed a legal option, a method that Gladbrook recently initiated for the first time in state history: Gather signatures from 20 percent of registered voters in the school district to force a dissolution process (that voters can still prevent from going through). If Collins wants to blow it all up, talk to people in Gladbrook.
The Baxter board meets tonight.
(h/t Austin Draude)
