Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

I used an unscientific formula to “rank” the primary routes from 1920, from the least to the most important. That will be a framework for blog posts about the system. The smallest spurs to the smallest towns, not surprisingly, fill the bottom ranks.

For the routes that lasted after 1980, I expanded their already existing pages and added photos to quite a few. If you try to go to a route in the 1920 series and it doesn’t have its own page, there should be an automatic redirect.

• IA 70, half a mile to Macksburg, leads off the list.
• Spurs that were practically unchanged until 1980 or shortly thereafter: 42, 54, 79, 87, 102
• IA 72 almost fit the above point, but it had changes to the west end and was extended to I-35 for six years.
• Spurs that were practically unchanged until 2003: 36, 41, 68, 82, 97.
  • IA 50 was extended into a double spur for decades, but its 1920 and 2003 endpoints were identical.
• Spurs that were unchanged or slightly changed except for a number replacement: 52 (to 272), 67 (to 55), 69 (to 138), 92 (to 363)
• Other routes: 81 (which later became IA 114), 84 (tied into the history of IA 999)

In 1920, Iowa was the 16th-largest state in the country by population. That population was as distributed as it was ever going to be, as many rural counties had peaked in population 20 years earlier and were already starting to decline.

As such, the primary route network, then and now, had a lot of the same ideas for community connections. But there are some noticeable holes in what we have now vs. what was marked in 1920. Aside from the interstates and four-lane roads, of course, these links tend to fall in broad groups.

• Two major diagonals, IA 60 and IA 330, came later. The former followed the Chicago, St. Paul, Minneapolis and Omaha Railway; the latter was a brand-new line that set off fierce debate in the Legislature.
• Long, straight or mostly-straight roads that go significant distances with few/very small towns along them.
  • The most glaring case is Cherokee to Pocahontas, which didn’t become a state highway for 20 years!
  • Nearly the entire routes of IA 21, IA 143, IA 188, and IA 281, and all of IA 182 and IA 346
  • Nearly the entire route of IA 15 (Rolfe to Armstrong), excluding the northernmost and southernmost portions
  • The north half of IA 146
  • IA 17 north of IA 3
  • IA 1 north of Iowa City, even though it follows the path of the original Military Road
  • IA 92 west of US 71
  • US 59 between Ida Grove and Denison, which seems odd because it connects two bordering county seats
  • IA 3 between Strawberry Point and Luxemburg
  • The Fayette County portion of IA 93
  • US 59 south of US 34
  • US 65 south of US 34
  • IA 25 south of US 34
  • IA 148 north of US 34 (notice a lot of these are in south-central or southwest Iowa)
  • All of the above segments combined put around two dozen towns lacking a state road on one or within a couple miles.
• Maybe-not-quite-as-straight roads that connect little towns along a railroad line.
  • The most obvious, following both a railroad and a river, is the 1920 lack of a “river road” between Dubuque and Clinton. A Davenport-Muscatine road along the river would be added in 1924.
  • All or nearly all of IA 16, IA 22, IA 24, IA 26, IA 78, IA 183 (post-2003 version), IA 191 (post-2003 version), and IA 210. IA 49 would have fit here.
  • IA 175 from the Missouri River to Onawa, Turin to Mapleton, Lohrville to Gowrie, and Dayton to Hubbard
  • IA 141 from Sloan to Smithland, Manilla to Manning, Coon Rapids to Perry, and Woodward to Camp Dodge (the four-lane to Grimes came later)
  • IA 38 north of IA 64
  • The north half of IA 48 (Red Oak to Griswold)
  • IA 4 south of Jefferson
  • IA 83 from Walnut to Atlantic
  • IA 136 between Wyoming and US 61
• Neither IA 37 east of Dunlap nor the north-south portion of 136 follow any particular railroad, but they sure aren’t straight either.

With the exception of a few short pieces and three longer ones, all of the roads listed above had become part of the state highway system by 1940. The long segments that came later were IA 188 between Plainfield and Clarksville (1949), IA 346 between the Little Brown Church and US 63 (1953), and IA 21 north of IA 8 (1969). The last was the last all-new two-lane road built for Iowa’s highway system (although it was planned as four). Already-existing county roads were incorporated into IA 21, 210, and 281 (1980) and IA 330 between Albion and US 30 (1989).

The last 30 years have been spent on expressways and freeways. The significant relocations of US 20 through Iowa River Greenbelt and between Early and Moorland are the biggest ones you can point at from a high-level view and say there weren’t any roads near them before.

As you saw in the glossary post, this stuff can get into the weeds. I admit that some of the things I’m researching, I’ve done over a longer time span than the roads in question officially existed. Here I want to explain how I’m doing what I’m doing.

There is no possible way I can pinpoint every original turn of every route. For example, roads that almost-but-not-quite paralleled a railroad, when paved, now ran flush with a railroad, often with no trace or just a partial trace of the old route left. A shift of one mile is usually noticeable; a shift of a few hundred feet is not. However, there are clues one can find today that tell us where the first routing was.

• The Huebinger maps and guides of the time, and Highway Commission minutes that use the township-and-range system to denote locations, can be compared with modern county maps. God bless the Land Ordinance of 1785 and the Public Land Survey System.
• Railroads don’t change. They may be gone, abandoned and converted to bike trails if they’re lucky, but tree lines and field scars are often visible from above. Conversely, for roads that followed section lines before being aligned with railroads, it’s very common for a quarter- or half-mile of road on that section line to be gone without a trace a few years after the move.
• Cemeteries don’t change. It wasn’t uncommon for a primary to go past a cemetery, and the road TO the cemetery might be the first paved segment in the area. Iowa’s oldest existing concrete road (as of 2020) is the cemetery road in Eddyville. However, that one wasn’t part of a primary.
• Streets outside of suburbs, for the most part, don’t change … except when their names do. And there appear to be a LOT of citywide cases of the latter. But names like Indianola Avenue in Des Moines and Independence Avenue in Waterloo are lovely neon arrows pointing to old alignments. (You do have to watch for red herrings, though.)
• Downtowns don’t change. Highways that make sense as straight lines today but skirt, avoid, or run perpendicular to the main business blocks (or block, singular) may not have followed what seems like an obvious alignment today. This point was driven home when I figured out there was such a case in Traer.

It’s the Winding Stairs! Our beautiful, iconic stairs! And something painted on the light pole beside it…something that microfilm can’t reveal…

This photo is conclusive evidence that IA 59’s first route in Traer was NOT running up and down all of Main Street, but rather going east-west a block to go through downtown. The design of the streetlight the 59 marker is painted on was brought back in a city project in the late 1980s.

But knowing a route went through a downtown and how it got out of a downtown are two separate things. This is much more difficult because while the Highway Commission was involved in selecting routes, it was not at the time involved in municipal maintenance. That didn’t happen until the late 1930s. On so many maps of the time, once a marked line hits city limits it disappears, and there’s no Google Street View, 1920s edition. So, more often than I’d like, I will be doing this:

The Highway Commission put out a detailed list of every routing in every community in February 1936. These are what formed the basis of the route logs that were put online a few years ago. But the online logs are incomplete, and omit nearly anything from a route before a renumbering. In addition, I doubt that spur routes had primary markings all the way to downtown, because the paint job was a county supervisor contract. So when I look at spur routes, I will be looking at what, in all likelihood, probably wasn’t the 1920 end but what would have been its end based on practices used later in the century.

State-level maps, and even county-level maps, of the time can only go so far. I will do my best to make it clear when I’m extrapolating and making a “more likely than not” estimate. I will be using present-day street names, urban and rural, for clarity, because “from the Smith corner to the Mason No. 2 school” tells us nothing nowadays (unless you have a plat book of the time, and even then it’s iffy).

This is an explainer for pages about the routes that made up Iowa’s 1920 highway system. It’s designed to augment, but definitely not replace, Jason Hancock’s and my websites.

• “In 1920, they knew it as”: Did the highway follow, or incorporate a piece of, an existing auto trail? “Existing” is based on Huebinger’s Automobile and Good Road Atlas of Iowa and the Iowa Registered Highway Routes, 1914-1925 map created by the Iowa DOT in 1986.
• “We know it as”: What is this route’s descendant(s)? This will be given in the most general of terms, usually close to the “linear” descendant(s), i.e. this route became this route became this route, regardless of alignment change.
• Let’s get granular: A route using modern roads, from dirt to four-lane, that hews as close as possible to what someone would have driven in the 1920s.
  • The most important sources here will be the 1914 county maps (with a certification date of Feb. 14, how romantic), late 1930s aerial photos, and the oldest-available blueprints from the Iowa DOT archives.
  • Known dead ends or notable frontage roads will be pointed out. The overall listing may end up discontinuous.
  • I will try to pinpoint county courthouses if their location is relevant to the route.
  • I realize this would be better as “show” rather than “tell” but I’m not versed in how to draw, or publish, a 300-mile-long multi-multi-turn route on Google Maps, let alone one that draws lines where there aren’t roads anymore.
  • Sometimes, vagueness for clarity’s sake will be required. For example, IA 3 (now IA 2) has so many nips and tucks that segments a mile long or more have been wiped off the map. When written as if a number follows the current road, an assumption of “within half a mile or so” may be needed in the non-flat areas of the state.
  • “Abandoned” and “vacated” will be used pretty much interchangeably to describe a road that was there but isn’t anymore. (In my view, strictly speaking, the former indicates the road is closed but remains visible, while the latter indicates all traces have been removed.) If it’s on a section or half-section line I might explain it in relation to the present-day road it aligned with.
  • Nearly nothing in 1920 ran along a railroad right-of-way (unless the railroad itself was parallel to a section line), so when such an alignment is included, it could mean I don’t have enough pre-1930s information to be more specific.
  • Within communities, I might suss out a “more likely than not” route that would cover a now-bypassed business district, with supporting evidence from late-1930s aerial photos.
• Related routes: Numerical replacements, routes it either gobbled up or got gobbled up by, spurs created because of an alignment change (even if long after the 1920 version was renumbered), etc. For the more important routes that became four-lane corridors in the last 30 years, this might become needlessly pedantic. (But being needlessly pedantic is what this site is all about! — Ed.)
• See also: Usually links to city-specific highway histories.
• Endpoints: Where, based on the information I have available, and as specifically as possible, did this route begin and end in 1920? Some of these will require more explanation and ambiguity than others.
• Along the route/Points of interest: A grab bag of stuff related to the route. The definition of “related” is up to the narrator.

It’s a project 100 years in the making. Or 20. Or five.

Since the fall of 2001 I have been chronicling the endpoints of current highways in Iowa. It’s something that has both reached backwards in time (for older ends of current routes) and radiated in different directions (my school timeline, or all the highway chronologies).

2020 is the 100th anniversary of the numbering of primary roads in Iowa — numbers were painted on utility poles across the state in the middle of July. The system we have today can be traced back to there. A centennial only rolls around once, so I thought I should figure out something special. Now, with resources that have become available only in the past half-decade, I think I have.

This website is going to explore every state route created in 1920. It will have an emphasis on the endpoints, as much as they can be discerned from here, but there will be much more. I will take a larger look at each route, pointing out things that my research has brought to light. I’ll share what I know, and sometimes, what I don’t know.

I’m not going to go in numerical order. I’m going to go in a vague order of importance and “interesting-ness”, starting with the small routes first. This will also give me more time to look into the big ones. Everything I can get my hands on is fair game for inclusion.

It’s going to be a journey of discovery — about highways, first, but also about Iowa and Iowans. Please join me.