Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

“My” J.C. Penney — that is, the one that was closest to me — is now a victim of that retail company’s continued troubles. Crossroads Mall in Waterloo has lost an original anchor tenant. There won’t be a Penney’s in the area at all.

Any double whammies of J.C. Penney and Sears stores being closed could put malls in deep trouble. That is not the case here. Yet.

July 5, 2013: Wagon Wheel Bridge across the Des Moines River in Boone County, upstream from the Kate Shelley High Bridges.

The Boone County supervisors returned $2 million in funding to replace a bridge that’s spanned the Des Moines River for more than a century.

According to the Ames Tribune, a bond issue for more money to build a replacement bridge was soundly rejected, leaving the state money unusable. That freezes any work in the area.

The bridge’s closure in 2010 cut out the river crossing between E41 and E26 and also makes the road that goes under the west side of the Kate Shelley High Bridges to get to this bridge a long dead end. In addition, the road behind the camera in the photo is supposed to be an alternate west-bank routing for the Dragoon Trail, but has been abandoned for a decade.

When I wrote my resolution to visit every Iowa town, I noted (and then had to revise) the number of incorporated places “as of this writing” — and there was a reason for that.

Center Junction in Jones County had a meeting about dissolving Monday night, and decided against it. Had the town voted otherwise, it would have been the third Iowa community in three years to disincorporate, following Mount Sterling and Millville.

It turns out that residents of Luther, in Boone County, filed a petition for disincorporation last September, but aside from that Boone News-Republican article and the one about the ensuing city council meeting I haven’t found anything to show this has moved forward.

More towns may have the same discussion. Iowa DNR regulations about sewer system upgrades are starting to bite tiny communities, including Luther. Throw in the threat of closed post offices  — a threat that, right now, appears to have diminished and been replaced with drastically reduced hours — and the trickle of discontinuations could continue.

The new Congress is being sworn in today, and Joni Ernst will be among those taking the oath of office for the first time. She is the first woman from Iowa to serve in the U.S. Senate. (Iowa has two other freshmen this year, in the House, making half the delegation newbies.)

It’s “old” news in the sense that we knew it would happen on Election Day, but after decades of “why hasn’t Iowa elected a woman” (we love our incumbents, and we keep losing House districts), the official start of her term is something to notice.

April 27, 2005: Ackworth, the second city in Iowa in alphabetical order, first in ZIP code order. [And this picture is nearly a decade old!]

When I started Iowa Highway Ends, I had the far-off goal of eventually traveling every mile of interstate, US highway, and state highway in Iowa. I am very close to that goal. It won’t be in the 10-year span I’d once figured, but I’m close. (And I could re-cover those early routes.)

As I closed in on that, and paid additional attention to endangered schools and post offices, it became feasible to imagine passing through every town in Iowa. As of this writing, there are 946 945 incorporated places. I had a list, and I began chipping away. I hit around three dozen last year.

After combing through my photo collection, trip logs, and diary entries, the list grew. Some entries, like Gruver and Fertile, emerged because their city limits aren’t technically on the highway that goes right by. There are a few that I was pretty sure I’d been to, but have no record (and so I’m totally kicking myself for not going to Nodaway either time I was in southwest Iowa this fall).

The good news is, I have fewer than 100 towns left. The bad news is, I have close to 100 towns left, including a few that unincorporated this century. I don’t intend on reaching all of them before the end of this year, but from Alburnett to Yetter, Rake to Rathbun, I want to get there eventually.

Sept. 2, 2008: Bookending the post with the last Iowa town alphabetically.

UPDATE: Forgot Millville disincorporated last year.

I am all for Iowa and Iowans not trying to be something and someone we aren’t. We have a certain image, and there’s nothing wrong with that, per se. When was the last time an Iowa-ISU football intro didn’t pan over a cornfield at some point?

But it sounds like ABC is going whole-hog (cough) on coastal versions of Iowa stereotypes in the upcoming “Bachelor” with Iowa native Chris Soules. Take this promo, where he’s literally out standing in his field, or the title of this post, which is what he’s been dubbed.

(We certainly wouldn’t want to point out that the idea of an Iowa full of young farm families is in the fourth decade of a major reality check and reaching crisis levels. No, that’s not what something like this is about.)

At the same time, Shawn Johnson is going on “Celebrity Apprentice,” and I have no idea how she was expecting not to encounter some sort of pigeonholing.