Hitchcock House and the UGRR

Hitchcock House

Another stop with the class I took this summer was the Hitchcock House, one of the most heavily promoted Underground Railroad sites in Iowa. It was the home of abolitionist and friend of John Brown, Rev. George Hitchcock. It’s located outside Lewis, Iowa and was the next major stop on the UGRR after Tabor, IA. The house was made of native sandstone walls. It had been in bad shape before it was restored. In the cellar is a fireplace that John Brown is known to have preached in front of and one of the best

John Brown Preached Here

documented actual secret rooms in the state. It was near many draws going to the river and provided both secret routes to get in and out and clear views from the house looking out over the rise. As a museum, unfortunately, they are on the Quilt Code bandwagon which makes you doubt the historical rigor applied to the research behind a lot of what they say, but the John Brown connection is solid and as secret rooms go this one is an actual room and they have oral histories from people who lived in the house while it was occupied describing how it was hidden.

http://www.hitchcockhouse.org

Giant Golden Spike

Giant Golden Spike

The popular culture interest in the Union Pacific probably hit its peak in 1939 when the movie Union Pacific came out, starring Barbara Stanwyck.  Paramount Studios decided to get extra publicity by hosting events in Omaha as part of the national premier celebration of the movie. These events were all held in Omaha. Council Bluffs resented this as THEY were the official starting place of the Transcontinental Railroad so they set out to grab an event and some publicity of their own. Quickly they put together a giant cement golden spike and brought the stars of the movie over in a special train to dedicate it. It is still there in a small park today right by the track and regularly re-painted gold. It’s interesting what giant cement statues people have created across the country. Here’s another one to add to the list.

Durham Western Heritage Museum

Durham Western Museum

Durham Western Heritage Museum is in the restored Union station in Omaha, Nebraska directly across from Council Bluffs, Iowa. It was unique as a train station because it was opened in 1931 and was done in an art deco style inside and out. The peak years of use were between 1942 and 1945 when 10,000 passengers went through the building a year. By the 1960s, passenger service was down to one train a day. The final passenger train went through on April 30, 1971 and at that point Union Pacific wanted to tear the station down, but a groundswell of local support saved the building and turned it into a museum.

Statue in Main Hall of Durham Western Museum

The main floor is restored as closely as possible to the original design and layout and still be functional as a museum. Of special interest are the cast figures who represent travelers scattered around the main floor AND the working soda fountain. I love cherry phosphates.

Cherry Phosphate at Soda Fountain

The bottom floor had displays on the history of Union Pacific, the history of the Omaha World’s Fair, and other parts of Omaha life. I really think this was about the best museum we went to during my class. I highly recommend it both as a great example of art deco architecture and as a museum.

http://www.durhammuseum.org

Giant Windmills

Wind Turbines in Field

Today as you drive across the Midwest, especially Iowa (we’re third in the country for wind power) are the huge wind turbines that are now dotting the fields. Where once each farmer had a windmill or maybe 2 to pump water, these giants generate electricity. You will see them in large clumps spread out across fields. The heads turn to catch the wind, but they don’t all turn at once. These huge windmills  you mostly see today are 1 megawatt, but there are bigger ones that are 2 megawatts. Each unit provides the farmer with $4000 a year and takes an acre of land. If the sweep of the arms cross property lines, the money must be split. One factory that produces them is here in Cedar Rapids and you will sometimes see one arm of a windmill go buy, longer than a normal semi truck trailer. If you are taking the normal Laura route between Walnut Grove and De Smet, you will get an excellent view of the wind farms located near highway around Lake Benton.

Amelia Bloomer’s Grave

Road to Amelia Bloomer's Grave

I picked up the habit in childhood of visiting famous people’s graves. Later as I grew more interested in Wilder, my mother starting saying that every vacation we ended up in a cemetery looking for dead Wilders (I pointed out that sometimes it was dead Ingalls, etc., but she remained unconvinced.

During my class in Council Bluffs this summer we got to stop at the Fairview Cemetery. Although I hadn’t done enough pre-work for this trip (really I didn’t, I literally just found out something I should have known about Tabor before I went this week – I’ll share soon), but there was a sign that said Amelia Bloomer was buried somewhere inside. I knew Amelia Bloomer was just one of the leading suffragettes that lived in Iowa, but I hadn’t realized she was buried in Council Bluffs. With no further help from any special sign or the map posted near the gate, I set off to find her. It was quite a hunt, but finally I located the Amelia Bloomer stone.
In case you find yourself in Council Bluffs, here is how to find it yourself. Enter Fairview Cemetery at the entrance with the sign bearing her name. Follow up the road until it splits, forming a pointed island between the two roads (the island is shown in the first photo above). Amelia’s

Amelia Bloomer's Grave

stone is about three rows into this island. It’s a white pillar stone with a flat historic marker stone in front of it. Her husband is on the opposite side of the tall white stone. Happy hunting!

Western Trials Center in Council Bluffs

Relative Heights Western Trials Center

I was very glad to finally get a chance to visit the Western Trail Center of Council Bluffs, Iowa as it had been on my To-Do list for a long time. I got to stop there this summer. I thought it would be a perfect connection to Laura Ingalls Wilder and its very interesting.

It’s set back in a restored prairie area. The building is very prairie school style. It’s is made out of limestone and fits very well with the landscape. On the outside is a good gathering area for groups. In a very clever design a rock is carved to show the terrain and relative heights above sea level from the Missouri River to the Pacific Ocean. It’s large enough to really bring home the scale and the difference of heights.

Inside they had several areas. The museum is also an Iowa Welcome Center which gave us a place to get a feel for the area. One thing I thought was very interesting was that they put the learning objectives for the center right on the wall. The middle area was a combination artistic diorama and timeline showing different facets of trial travel in the west, supported by photos, quotes from primary documents, etc. This is definitely an interesting place to visit if you’re interested in trails from pioneer times to modern days.

Learn more about it here:

http://lewisandclarktrail.com/section1/iowacities/CouncilBluffs/WesternHistoricTrailsCenter

Tabor, Iowa and the UGRR

Todd House

John Patrick Morgans literally wrote the book on the Underground Railroad in southern Iowa and especially Tabor, Iowa. The book is called John Todd and the Underground Railroad: A Biography of an Iowa Abolitionist. Morgans says that the Underground Railroad (UGRR) is one of the least understood stories in Iowa history. Although in Iowa we tend to think of ourselves as a northern state, the South was always very close. Cotton didn’t do well in Missouri or Kansas, but hemp did. Hemp was an incredibly important crop for making ropes, among other necessary products, and there were many slaves tasked to its production as a cash crop. Slavery could easily have spread in the Midwest.

Most of the slaves that came through Iowa were escaping from Missouri or Arkansas. Iowa was the state with the longest border with a slave state without a geographic obstacle for crossing, no rivers and no mountains. The rivers there were guided you through to Iowa and provided transportation and guidance of direction. This ease of access caused some people in Iowa, especially politicians to vote with the Southern block for fear of a widespread migration of African-Americans into Iowa.

Tabor, Iowa was unique both in political geography and in location. Tabor served as an arms depot and training ground of sorts for Bloody Kansas. It was a stable location, but close enough to the action to be useful. In fact, even the guns that were eventually used in John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia spent 2 years hidden in Tabor. It was also close enough that the slave bounty hunters and southern men knew exactly what was going on and they lived under constant threat of being caught.

Politically Tabor was an interesting town because when it was established in 1854, the settlers were all strongly connected to the highly liberal Overland College. It was the most liberal college in the country at the time, allowing both men and women and blacks and whites to all attend the same classes. This liberal outlook on life meant that pretty much everyone in town was involved and supported both the Underground Railroad and the struggle to win Kansas over to the Free Soil side. Leading these efforts was Rev. John Todd.

Missouri had already been in near chaos from early rumbles of the Civil War from 1855 on. By 1860, 40,000 slaves left Missouri which was almost a third of the total population.  John Brown made a final visit to Iowa in March and the attack on Harper’s Ferry came in October.  During this final visit the town of Tabor, which had previously supported John Brown, turned on him for crossing a line by stealing and killing unnecessarily.

Tabor was a major site on the Underground Railroad. Tabor today is a small town. It’s laid out on the courthouse square model with a large town park in the center that was once used as a camp ground by John Brown when he visited the area. The park also was the center of the campus that once housed the college that the town’s people tried to create in the image of Oberlin, but the lack of an endowment brought the effort to an end in the first throws of the Great Depression in 1927. Today only two buildings remain as a sign of the college.

Town Green in Tabor, Iowa

The major site in Tabor is the John Todd house. Todd was a missionary and a major leader in the efforts to support runaway slaves and the abolition of slavery in the area. It was in his cellar that John Brown’s guns waited for two years until Brown took them for his raid on Harpers

Possible Secret Room

Ferry. There is a small secret room in the house, but such hiding places were generally unnecessary because there was such universal support in the town. However, bounty hunters were frequent, especially when transporting between stations.

Majors took up a new note today talking about how the Underground Railroad Story was unknown, it was frequently misrepresented. For example, urban legends have it that the town is riddled with tunnels, but not a single tunnel as been found, even when the National Park Service brought in ground penetrating radar to look for evidence of them. However, having driven by the house and talked to the clerk at the Casey’s Store, Pulitzer Prize winning author Marilynne Robinson, described the tunnels of Tabor in her novel Gilead and then talked about her extensive research.

Seed Savers Fall Festival

Burr Oak, Iowa is about 10 minutes north of Decorah. Decorah is home of the Seed Savers Exchange. This year’s fall festival included everything from a Best Harvest Soup contest to a sampling of more than 18 varieties of 19th century apples. There will be music by Western Home String Band, historic orchard tours, kids activities, and hiking.

http://www.seedsavers.org/fall_harvest.htm

They have other events all year, such as a lesson in apple grafting.

http://www.seedsavers.org/applegrafting.htm

Seed Savers is also a fascinating stop even when nothing special is going on. Consider dropping by on your next visit to Burr Oak.

Norman Borlaug Food Hero

One of the most famous living Iowan recently passed away. Norman Borlaug was the moving force behind the Green Revolution that saved billions of lives. Borlaug was the founder of the World Food Prize. He received the Nobel Peace Prize, the Congressional Gold Medal, and Presidential Medal of freedom.

Bill Gates recently said of him. “In the middle of the 20th century, experts predicted famine and starvation, but they turned out to be wrong – because they did not predict Norman Borlaug. He not only showed humanity how to get more food from the earth – he proved that farming has the power to lift up the lives of the poor.”

http://www.iptv.org/series.cfm/20529/freedom_from_famine_norman

Borlaug spent most of his life fighting so that people would have enough food. He is credited with saving the lives of billions of people by developing high-yielding crops that averted famine.

An editorial by Dirck Stiemel quoted his 2000 30th anniversary of his Nobel Prize speech:

“The world has the technology – either available or advanced in the research pipeline – to feed on a sustainable basis a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology. While affluent nations can certainly afford to adopt ultra-low risk positions, and pay more for food produced by so-called ‘organic’ methods, the 1 billion chronically undernourished people of low-income, food-deficit nations cannot.”

A local group is working on the restoration and preservation of his birthplace and the one-room school he attended. They are putting together a full slate of activities honoring his legacy. Read about it here:

http://www.normanborlaug.org/index-orig.htm

For the U.S. Congress tribute, click here:

http://www.radioiowa.com/2009/09/30/u-s-house-honors-norman-borlaug

Read his obituary here:

http://www.mexidata.info/id2442.html

Wilder Conference on Display

Wilder Call for Papers on Display

Just thought you’d like to see the Call for Papers for the Wilder Conference in 2010 on display in the research room of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library.