Digging for Our Roots, Part 2: North Liberty, Iowa

20 August, 2013

We traveled all of 19 miles to our next campground and are staying here near Iowa City for the next several days. Lots to see in this area: Kalona, Herbert Hoover Presidential Library, the University of Iowa and, of course, Kalona.

I was so excited to go to Kalona, advertised as being the business hub of the largest Amish community west of the Mississippi and the quilt capital of Iowa. Well….the Amish part is a bit overhyped. There is a large Amish population in the surrounding country, but their presence in the town is not particularly noticeable. I was much more impressed with Shipshewana, Indiana, which we will be visiting after Notre Dame.

I did enjoy the quilt blocks embedded in the sidewalks around the downtown area. And there was a wonderful quilt shop, so I made up for my disappointment by buying some nice fabric. And the day was sweetened by treating myself to a Dutch letter from the local bakery. Yumm!!

Saturday, we spent the day in West Branch, the site of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and the gravesite for Hoover and his wife. The museum is nicely done. I must have learned some of this stuff in school, but I sure didn’t remember it. I came away with a new respect for the man’s humanitarian efforts and raw talents. The National Parks has a historical village behind the library which includes Hoover’s birth home where he lived for his first eleven years before he became an orphan and was sent to Oregon to live with his aunt. The man’s Quaker roots and his orphaning at an early age shaped who he became; one of the most effective humanitarians in the United States and a very poor politician.

Sunday, we drove around the University of Iowa. School starts in a week and the students haven’t yet returned, so it was quiet. Kind of hard to find the campus, since the buildings are totally integrated in with the city, including the old capitol building, and there wasn’t a discernible architecture theme to the buildings. It is a major research university with over 30,000 students.

Then on Monday, we went back to Kalona and toured the Quilt Museum. Although it was not large, it had some very nice Amish and “English” quilts. The surprise was the spool cabinets. These cabinets were used in the 1800s to display thread for sale in general stores. They were beautiful pieces of furniture. I would love to own one, but I bet they are pretty scarce, at least the elaborate ones like we saw.

The Devonian Fossil Gorge was just a bit north of our campground, so we headed up there in the afternoon. Interesting to see the fossilized corals and primitive animals in the limestone. Iowa used to be part of a tropical sea back in the day, like 400 million years ago. All that is buried under several hundred feet of soil and other rock, but this gorge was exposed during the 1993 flood. We saw a very interesting video of the floods (there was another one in 2008) and the role that the Coralville dam played in mitigating the damage downstream.

Tomorrow we will leave Iowa. It has been a lot of fun seeing the out-of-way and not so out-of-way places. We are on our way to Chicago!

One of the more than 40 quilt blocks embedded into the sidewalks of Kalona.

The downtown section of Kalona. A typical Iowan small town.

This is the home where Herbert Hoover was born and where he lived until he was 10, when he was orphaned.

A view of some of the beautiful grounds of Hoover's presidential library and museum.

Walking on a path through a restored tall prairie grass field towards Hoover's gravesite.

Herbert was the first president to use a telephone in the White House. He was an early technology adopter.

After his wife died, he lived in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel until his 90s, writing his memoirs and working various humanitarian projects. This is a replica of his living room at the Waldorf.

Fishing was a lifelong passion for Herbert.

As a child, one of the few pleasures he was allowed was to go fishing.

Overlooking the restored prairie grass.

Hoover insisted on a simple gravesite, reflecting his Quaker roots.

The University of Iowa's Kinnick Stadium.

The old Capitol building is now part of the University of Iowa.

For all you Trekkies, we came across the future birthplace of James T. Kirk in our wanderings. This marker was inexplicably behind a small beauty shop, completely out of view.

A beautiful handmade Amish quilt in the Kalona Quilt Museum. Most of the quilts displayed were from the mid to late 1800s. They were in excellent condition!