Around the state in 8 days: Day 1
Cedar Rapids to Dubuque via Muscatine on a circumnavigation adventure
Start of an intermittent series.
Prologue
A decade into my personal work at Iowa Highway Ends, I had visited every incorporated town that was on a state highway and most that had recently been on one. At the beginning of 2013, I pulled out a map and circled all the towns I hadn’t been to yet. As I planned my trips, I kept that map in mind. I also kept a similar map on the computer, placing and deleting dots as necessary.
Two years later, I had marked off enough towns on that map that I felt comfortable setting a resolution: I would, at some point, visit every incorporated place in Iowa.
As I considered vacation possibilities for a week in fall 2015, I noticed that a number of unvisited towns were within a few miles of the state line. Getting to all of them would take a lot of time.
Then I had a thought. What if, as part of my travels around the state, I traveled around the state? I could follow two prominent scenic routes, the Great River Road and Loess Hills Scenic Byway. I would not press myself for time and I could visit museums at my leisure.
In this series, I will recap that trip, with notes from previous and subsequent visits to the same places.
Bridges, barns and a Blood Moon rising
The starting point of the circuit was Muscatine, at the Mark Twain Scenic Overlook. To get there, I followed Iowa Highway 22, including its old route past the courthouse, and then on to Davenport. I had barely started and already passed my first school that wasn’t a school anymore: The building on the east side of Nichols is now apartments.
In Davenport, I crossed two of the three oldest Mississippi River bridges in the area. One was the Government Bridge to the Rock Island Arsenal. This bridge is the fourth iteration, built in 1896 using piers from 1872. The Iowa DOT has a history of the bridges. Both Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln are involved in the timeline of the first. I came back across the Centennial Bridge, which carries US 67. Following the replacement of the I-74 bridges — the last towers were brought down Sunday — the Centennial bumped up to the second-oldest. It is routinely on lists of Iowa’s most prominent “structurally deficient” bridges, but that is due to the width of the deck and the amount of traffic it carries. The Illinois Department of Transportation routinely inspects the bridge for safety.
Le Claire has the Buffalo Bill Museum. William F. Cody was born in Le Claire and the family homestead is preserved south of McCausland. Cody rose to fame with his Wild West Shows, so here at the Mississippi River, this is one place you could say the West began. The museum also has a wooden-hulled paddlewheel steamboat that traveled interior American waters for a century.
I left the highway hugging the Mississippi River (US 67 south of Sabula, US 52 north of it) to check two towns off the list: Andover, in Clinton County, and Springbrook, in Jackson County.
US 67’s national north end, just west of Sabula, has far different scenery than that at its south end in Presidio, Texas, at the Mexican border, northwest of Big Bend National Park. To the east of that intersection, I hit two landmarks that have since been demolished. Sabula’s school, built in 1883/1925, closed in 2013 and was demolished at the tail end of 2015. It was one of a handful outside Sioux City that was used in both the 19th and 21st centuries. The US 52 bridge across the Mississippi River was replaced in 2017 after 85 years of service.
St. Donatus is billed as a “Historic Luxembourg Village.” At Kalmes Restaurant there was a Democratic Party event going on, judging by the campaign signs taped to the entrance. On the other side of the highway, the oldest barn in Iowa was open to the public as part of the Iowa Barn Foundation’s All-State Barn Tour. The fall 2023 All-State Barn Tour is Sept. 16-17.
I stopped in Dubuque early enough to get a riverside seat for the lunar eclipse happening that night. It was the Blood Moon. The eclipse happened early in the night. Space.com said it’s the only supermoon lunar eclipse to happen between 1982 and 2033.
Total incorporated towns visited: 14, 2 new (Andover, Springbrook)
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Interesting tidbits. Glad you made stops in Davenport and LeClaire!
Interesting tidbits. Glad you made stops in Davenport and LeClaire!