Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

OH HO, what do we have here?

Transfer of jurisdiction agreement number TJ‑318‑0(3)‑‑2M‑86, between the city of Clutier and the Iowa Department of Transportation, transferred that portion of Iowa 318 from Front Street north and east to the east corporation line of the City of Clutier to city jurisdiction on August 18, 1980.

Transfer of jurisdiction agreement number TJ‑318‑0(2)‑‑2M‑86, between Tama County and the Iowa Department of Transportation, transferred that portion of Iowa 318 from the east corporation line of the City of Clutier east to a junction with Iowa 21 at the Tama‑Benton County line near the NE Corner Section 24‑T84N‑R13W to county jurisdiction on July 22, 1980.

To you, this is pretty dry stuff. To me, this is a treasure trove of information that otherwise would have taken days upon days going through microfilm with an un-assured chance of success — and I know this because I did spend days going through 40 years of microfilm of Highway Commission minutes, a decade ago.

The highways available in the list do not include any before the Great Renumbering of 1969, but do include the Great Decommissionings of 1980 and 2003. This means that in there are also the official hard-to-pin-down endpoints of all those spurs, like IA 318, above. Many spurs that survived to 2003 had endpoints closer to downtowns until 1980. (But completeness or not, I’m not keen on going back to Bussey to get a photo at the west city limits.) This will give us official dates, but not necessarily when signs came down or were changed.

There’s information going back all the way to 1936 and 1937, when exact route descriptions were logged for every city and county, but only if the route had the same number through at least 1978, when it looks like all the routes were re-entered. (God bless the township-and-range system.)

This will certainly cause me to do a complete revision and update to my 900s series pages (anyone remember I have these?) and may be the cause for blog posts later.

Big thanks to whoever did this. Kind of makes up for the Sufficiency Log going kaput.

June 8, 2015: New, larger highway shields at the US 61/IA 38 intersection, and their arrows beneath, conform to revised MUTCD guidelines. In my opinion, it’s not an improvement.

I’ve added photos taken in April and June 2015 to the website. The bulk of the pictures are in and south of Muscatine, as I traveled the rerouted IA 92 and also took pictures to the south.

One photo or more has been added to IA 13, 38, 103, 212, 225, 249, 252, 305, 419, and 921. There are lots of new photos on the Lansing and Business 61 (Muscatine) pages.

April 17, 2015: Relocated “End 9” and WI 82 shields at the foot of the Black Hawk Bridge in Lansing.