Iowa Trivia & Tidbits - Page 10

Looking for Iowa trivia? Try our list Iowa little know facts, tidbits and trivia.

Fashion designer Roy Halston, born in 1932 in Des Moines, became famous for designing the pillbox hat worn by Jackie Kennedy for the 1961 presidential inauguration.

first appeared: 8/31/2003

Lineville (pop. 273) earns its name because it straddles the Iowa and Missouri state line.

first appeared: 8/24/2003

Merry-go-round riders whirl on ponies, pigs, and roosters on the Story City (pop. 3,228) carousel, built in 1913 by the Herschell-Spillman Co. of New York, and a rarity with its barnyard critters.

first appeared: 8/17/2003

Lyman Dillon, a farmer from Cascade (pop. 1,958), plowed the state’s first road, a furrow from Dubuque to Iowa City in 1839.

first appeared: 8/10/2003

Bonaparte (pop. 458) is the nation’s smallest Main Street community in the National Trust for Historic Preservation program. In 1986, residents raised $100,000 in three weeks to kick off a downtown revitalization.

first appeared: 8/3/2003

Francis Childs of Manchester (pop. 5,257) won the 2002 National Corn Growers Association Corn Yield Contest with a world-record yield of 442.14 bushels per acre.

first appeared: 7/27/2003

On July 6, 1881, Kate Shelley, 15, became an international heroine after crawling across the Des Moines River bridge on a stormy night to alert an oncoming passenger train about a collapsed trestle. A railroad museum in Moingona near Boone (pop. 12,803) is named after her.

first appeared: 7/20/2003

At the world’s largest truck stop, Iowa 80 in Walcott (pop. 1,528), truckers find food, fuel, a dentist, embroidery shop, barbershop, business center, truckers’ store, and more. A Trucking Hall of Fame museum is under construction.

first appeared: 7/13/2003

Atlantic (pop. 7,257) toasts itself as the “Coca-Cola Capital of Iowa” in honor of its bottling plant and Coca-Cola Days parade and festival each September.

first appeared: 7/6/2003

The six-story 1843 Potter’s Mill in Bellevue (pop. 2,350), the state’s oldest mill, now operates as a bed and breakfast and restaurant.

first appeared: 6/29/2003

Aviator Eugene Ely made the first flight from a warship on Nov. 14, 1910, when he took off in a Curtiss airplane from a wooden platform on the cruiser, USS Birmingham. Ely was born in 1886 in Davenport.

first appeared: 6/22/2003

The one-room schoolhouse where Superintendent O.H. Benson originated the idea in 1907 for the 4-H emblem, a four-leaf clover, is a museum in Clarion (pop. 2,968).

first appeared: 6/15/2003

The 1909 Park Inn in Mason City (pop. 29,172) is the last standing hotel designed by architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

first appeared: 6/8/2003

The Fenelon Place Elevator in Dubuque (pop. 57,686) is the world’s shortest and steepest railway, built in 1882 so banker J.K. Graves could nap during lunchtime. Graves, who lived atop a bluff and worked below, spent one hour traveling home by buggy. With his railway—296 feet long and ascending 189 feet—he could eat, nap, and return to work refreshed.

first appeared: 6/1/2003

Nevada (pop. 6,658) was named after the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1853 by Joseph Thrift, a Story County commissioner who journeyed the mountains as a California “Forty-Niner.” The word, nevada, is Spanish for snow-capped.

first appeared: 5/25/2003

Since 1962, policy at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls (pop. 36,145) requires that 0.5 percent of the budget for new or renovated state buildings be allotted for outdoor sculpture.

first appeared: 5/18/2003

Henry and Lena Johnson of Exira (pop. 810) celebrated their 83rd wedding anniversary on Feb. 8. The world record for longest marriage is held by William and Claudia Ritchie of Paris, Ky., (pop. 9,183), who celebrated their 83rd on April 12, 2002. William died last November.

first appeared: 5/11/2003

Mount Hosmer Park in Lansing (pop. 1,012) offers a 50-mile vista of the Mississippi River valley and Iowa, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

first appeared: 5/4/2003

Carrie Chapman Catt, suffragist and founder of the League of Women Voters, grew up in Charles City (pop. 7,812) and graduated from Iowa Agricultural College and Model Farm (now Iowa State University) in Ames in 1880.

first appeared: 4/27/2003

The National Czech & Slovak Museum & Library in Cedar Rapids is the nation’s leading repository for collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting objects of Czech and Slovak culture and history.

first appeared: 4/20/2003

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