Around the state in 8 days: Day 7
Harmony school and disharmony in the Honey and Civil wars
Part of an intermittent series: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5½, 6
Oct. 3, 2015, was a college football Saturday, so I listened to the Kansas-Iowa State game in Ames via, surprisingly enough, KWMT-AM in Fort Dodge. The Cyclones’ 38-13 victory over Kansas would turn out to be the second-to-last win of the Paul Rhoads era, followed only by a Halloween shutout of Texas. (Kansas went winless in 2015. The 2015 Texas team, which finished 5-7 with three of those losses by a combined 10 points, at one point was billed by Wikipedia as “among the worst teams in program history” but that’s been taken out.)
Starting from Lamoni, I originally planned to go east on county roads, but called it off. That turned out to pay off later.
Two 1964 buildings with very divergent futures
In Corydon, my camera had problems when I was at the courthouse. Someone asked me why I was taking pictures. The 1964 Wayne County Courthouse is one of Iowa’s few postwar courthouses, so it might not get as much photographic love, but I explained that I was taking pictures of all the courthouses.
St. Anthony Catholic Church in Rathbun also was built in 1964. A Centerville Ad Express Daily Iowegian story in 1985 said the church began when Croatians came to the area in the 1890s. The same paper reported the church, along with St. Francis in Mystic, shut down in 1996 when a replacement priest could not be found. Half a century later, the building was abandoned, and its last organist had died six months earlier. Anne Marie Chebuhar’s obituary said the 95-year-old “was a loving mother and homemaker. The only other job she had was at the dime store in Centerville. Anne didn’t particularly like this position, so she retired after one hour.”
In Centerville, I stopped at the Double R Dairy Bar at the intersection of Iowa highways 2 and 5 to get a “small” ice cream cone that turned out to be pretty big. Now the Double R is gone, and so is the Iowegian.
What’s not gone yet is the sign for the Motel 60, even if the building itself is not in use. The name is a remarkable remnant of the road’s previous number. On January 1, 1969, Iowa Highway 60, a route that had run from the Missouri state line to U.S. Highway 18 since 1931, was broken up into Iowa Highway 17 north of Granger and Iowa Highway 5 south of Des Moines.
Bloomfield had a pleasant surprise: an “expo” around the courthouse with classic cars on display and some sellers’ tents. I got a free sample of fresh apple cider and free hot dog, which accounted for half my meal. Sadly, the museum was closed.
Southeast of Bloomfield, in Cantril, the Dutchman’s Store was as busy as always. The store’s selection is wide and large, from bulk groceries to bolts of fabric. The store also serves the large Amish population in the area. A new, larger Dutchman’s Store opened Sept. 20, 2024.
I got stuck behind a truck kicking up lots of dust on the way to Mount Sterling, which like Athelstan disincorporated this century. Mount Sterling made the New York Times in 2003 when its colorful mayor, Jo Hamlett, proposed a city ordinance to ban lying. After Hamlett died, the next mayor told the Ottumwa Courier, interest in keeping the town alive started to wane. No one voted in the 2011 city election. Mount Sterling officially disincorporated in 2012.
I headed east from Mount Sterling into Missouri on a road that was part of the Waubonsie Trail auto trail in the 1910s. If the Sullivan Line had been drawn straight east from Athelstan, Route V would be on the Iowa side of the border. This is the area where the Honey War was fought, or more accurately, not fought.
I did a large loop in southeast Van Buren County to photograph the Harmony schools. Six weeks before my trip, the Harmony school district voted to give up its high school and enter into whole-grade sharing with Van Buren. As part of that plan, the century-old Bonaparte school shut down in 2016. Harmony’s elementary students moved to the school site at the intersection of county roads J40 and W46 just west of the Lee County line.
The two districts later merged. As of 2023-24, Van Buren Community is the third-largest district by size in the state. Due to other sharing arrangements, its high school in Keosauqua serves the sixth-largest area in the state. Elementary students are split between Harmony and Douds in the northwest corner of the district. The district is so far southeast that its weather-related announcements are carried by the Keokuk-Hannibal-Quincy TV stations.
Only two bridges have spanned 145 years across the Des Moines River at Bonaparte. The first was built in 1878 and became part of the state highway system in 1920. It was replaced in 1960 by the state, and now itself needs to be replaced. A sign at the bridge notes that Brigham Young and the Mormons crossed the river here in 1846.
After crossing a new bridge for Iowa Highway 2 into Farmington, I found out that a church-turned-museum next door to Casey’s was open (only Saturdays, 1 to 4). The museum had a large display about the Honey War, and jars of honey for sale. If you can manage to get to Farmington in that small window, I recommend that museum.
By the Secretary of State’s Office list of cities, Farmington is the oldest town on record, with an incorporation date of January 11, 1841. However, the 1878 History of Van Buren County, Iowa pointed to a slightly later date, and I found out that on February 22, 1847, the first General Assembly after statehood re-legalized Farmington.
Southeast of Farmington is Croton, where there is a marker for the northernmost battle of the Civil War west of the Mississippi River. The main skirmish was across the border in Athens, Missouri, but cannonballs landed on the Iowa side. Union militia fired at Confederate militia from the Iowa side as well. Tom Gaard of Clive wrote an extensive recap of the battle in 2021. The battle is also the subject of an episode in Herb Hake’s “Landmarks in Iowa History” educational TV series that has been digitized by the University of Northern Iowa.
Finally, I stopped at the Keokuk National Cemetery. It is one of two national cemeteries in Iowa; there’s also a small one as part of Oakdale Cemetery in Davenport. Union soldiers who died in area field hospitals began to be buried there during the Civil War. Overseeing the plain white gravestones is a monument erected in 1912 to 48 unknown soldiers.
Incorporated communities visited: 13, 1 new (Rathbun); 87 total
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