Small towns and a tall tower

My route on Friday took me through many small towns of the Iowa countryside.  I saw some of the iconic sites of the Lincoln Highway.

In Belle Plaine, I stopped to take some pictures at George Preston's service station.  The Prestons serviced travelers on the Lincoln Highway for over 80 years, and they collected signs of all types.

The most famous bridge on the Highway is in Tama, Iowa.  It actually has the words "Lincoln Highway" build into the rails.




In Colo, at the intersection of the Lincoln Highway and the Jefferson Highway (New Orleans to Winnepeg), I had lunch at the Niland Cafe.  The hotel, cafe, and service station served LH autos, trucks, and buses for 70 years.  All are now restored.  The cafe had the front end of a 1939 Cadillac in one of the dining rooms.

A town called Nevada (I think they pronounce it nuh-VAY-duh) had a chainsaw sculpture of Lincoln in the front yard.

These grain elevators are everywhere.  Iowa is the nation's leading corn producer, and I saw a lot of soybeans, too.

The small town of Beaver was on the original LH route, but was soon taken off when the highway was re-routed a couple of years later.  This eliminated a couple of dangerous railroad crossings.  The LH follows much the same path as the Transcontinental Railroad, and Union Pacific engines haul huge trains up and down the tracks regularly.






Grand Junction is home to the Iowa Lincoln Highway Association.  The small downtown area had a lot of LH decorations, with this old bank building as the centerpiece.




When I arrived in Jefferson, Iowa, they had the town square blocked off and were beginning some type of festival.  When I parked and walked to the square, I was told it was their annual "Tower View" festival.  On one corner of the square, they have a 150-foot carillon tower which chimes on the quarter hour.  I rode to the top with a guide named Hannah, who said that a philanthropist named W. F. Mahanay left instructions in his will for the tower to be built.  She benefited from a scholarship program started by the Manhanays.  From the top, I could see about 20 miles.  The town also had a Lincoln statue, a hotel from the earliest days of the LH, and monuments to an Olympic archery medalist and a Medal of Honor pilot.

Lincoln statue, tower on left

View from the top

Doreen Wilbur

Northwest of Scranton, a Civil War veteran named J. E. Moss insisted that the LH be routed past his farm, where he built a pair of matching monuments to Lincoln.  Though once vandalized, they have been restored and look exactly like he intended in the 1920s.




Here is an assortment of LH markers I saw today...

Jefferson Highway marker at Niland's Cafe

Welcome to Iowa!

My first day in Iowa began with a visit to the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum.  This is located south of the Lincoln Highway in West Branch, where Hoover was born.  Even though he was orphaned as a child and sent to live with relatives in Oregon, he still considered this his home.  Though Hoover is still associated with the Great Depression, his accomplishments in life were actually remarkable.  He became a millionaire in the mining business, then headed up efforts to feed starving people both during and after World War I.  The southern part of the small town of West Branch is devoted to the museum, and many of the homes and buildings from Hoover's days there have been preserved and moved to the grounds of the museum.  He and his wife Lou are buried on a pretty hillside there.

Here are some Lincoln Highway markers and exhibits I saw along the way today.  The concrete posts were erected by the Boy Scouts and the Lincoln Highway Association in 1927, and they were supposed to mark the way "permanently."  Some of them have been relocated, but many remain in their original positions.

Front yard in Lisbon

Site of old LH bridge removed for
newer highway

The Abbe Creek School near Mt. Vernon,
named for first prominent settler of area

I got off the road early today, stopping in Cedar Rapids.  I went to a minor league baseball game, and the Cedar Rapids Kernels (yes, they're named for corn) took on the Quad Cities River Bandits.  This is what's called the Mid West League.

The Land of Lincoln

Before I tell you about my day crossing Illinois, I need to show you two more pics from Indiana--and one of them is the best one I took there!!!

I was in Valparaiso, and they had a nice public park with a big stage that seemed to be ready for a concert in the near future.  But by the main street under a shelter was a statue that I just HAD to have my picture made beside!  This is Orville Redenbacher, the popcorn guy, who was raised here.





The last mile of the Lincoln Highway in Indiana is what the founders of the road called the Ideal Section.  It was four-laned with lights for night driving and a greenspace area on one side of the road for hiking.  They hoped communities around the country would build similar stretches.  This stretch of the highway in Dyer, Indiana, is pretty busy, but I did walk down the shoulder to look at the Henry Ostermann Monument.  He was the Field Secretary of the early Lincoln Highway Association, and he was actually killed in an accident along the road.  This is a tribute to him.  When I got there, I wasn't actually sure if I had found it; it had been stripped of all of its markers.  I don't know if it's vandalism, or if somebody is trying to restore it.  But I'm pretty sure I was in the right place.  Some of you Lincoln Highway enthusiasts can tell me if I just didn't find the right place or not.



In Chicago Heights, Illinois, is where the Lincoln Highway (east-west) met the Dixie Highway (north-south).  Us Southerners see signs for the Dixie Highway on US 1 and US 41 in our neck of the woods.  At the place where these two great roads crossed, a statue of Lincoln with two little girls is found, as well as a Lincoln Highway fountain.



DeKalb, Illinois, had a great little park with an art-deco-looking Lincoln Highway marker and a cool information gazebo.

West of there, in a little place called Malta, was the first "seedling mile" of the Lincoln Highway.  The founders, who included not only automobile and parts manufacturers but also those who promoted highway-building materials, built these one-mile stretches throughout the Midwest and West where there weren't many paved roads at all.  This was to show how great concrete was for driving and encourage road building by governments.





This restored service station, at a place where the LH turns right in Rochelle, is a Lincoln Highway information center.





Franklin Grove, Illinois, is the home of the Lincoln Highway Association's National Headquarters.  It's in a building built by a relative of Abraham Lincoln, and it has all kinds of LH merchandise.  I was too late; it was closed for the day.

Dixon, Illinois, is the hometown of President Ronald Reagan.  I visited his boyhood home, where there's a cute park with a statue of him looking very presidential, but friendly.  Then I took Reagan Way a few blocks to the banks of the Rock River, where he was a young lifeguard.  There, a statue has been erected that has a young Reagan on a horse.

About five miles northeast of Dixon is a place called Grand Detour.  This is where John Deere developed the steel plow.  Apparently, the soil in this part of the world kept wearing out cast-iron plows, and Deere was a blacksmith.  The eventual headquarters of the farm machinery company was placed in Moline, Illinois, a transportation hub on the Mississippi River not too far away.

In a park in Sterling is a statue of Lincoln as he would have appeared in the Lincoln-Douglas debates.  A friend of his asked him and John C. Fremont, two of the earliest Republicans, to come speak in his town in 1856.




As the day was ending, I crossed the Mississippi River into Clinton, Iowa.  This is my first look at this great river, but I think it's a lot wider the farther south you go.  There was a big windmill beside the bridge on the Illinois side, where a town called Fulton is located.  Seems the place was settled by the Dutch.




Looking forward to Iowa!!!