Iowa

Header image from Iowa Department of Natural Resources/ State Parks, Backbone State Park, Iowa.

Iowa was admitted as the 29th state on December 28, 1846.

Bird: Willow Goldfinch or American Goldfinch

These are active and acrobatic little finches that cling to weeds and seed socks, and sometimes mill about in large numbers at feeders or on the ground beneath them. Goldfinches fly with a bouncy, undulating pattern and often call in flight, drawing attention to themselves. The American goldfinch is gregarious during the non-breeding season, when it is often found in large flocks, usually with other finches. The social hierarchy, measured by how many aggressive encounters are won by each individual, tends towards the male being dominant in the non-breeding season. During the breeding season, this finch lives in loose colonies. While the nest is being constructed, the male will act aggressively toward other males who intrude into his territory, driving them away, and the female reacts in the same way toward other females. This aggressiveness subsides once the eggs have been laid. State bird of Washington, Iowa, and New Jersey.

Flower: Wild Prairie Rose

The rose is our national flower and the state flower of New York, the Cherokee rose is the state flower of Georgia, and the wild prairie rose is also the state flower of North Dakota and Iowa. The Wild Prairie Rose is not only known for its beauty but also for its medical and food uses. The rise hips and roots are used to treat inflammation of the eye. The fruit can be eaten raw or made into jellies. The stems and leaves are used in teas. Wildlife also take advantage of the wild prairie rose. Various birds, deer, antelope, elk, sheep, and pheasants feed on the rose hips. Skunks, rabbits, and gophers feed off of the fruits, stems, and foliage.

Tree: Bur Oak

The oak tree was chosen by the 59th Iowa General Assembly as Iowa’s official tree on March 13, 1961. Although Iowa did not designate a specific species of oak as its state tree, many people recognize bur oak, (Fagaceae Quercus macrocarpa,) as the state tree since it is the most widespread species in the state. The oak tree became the State Tree of Iowa in 1961 as a symbol of strength. There are 12 species of oak trees native to Iowa including pin, swamp white, black, red, chinkapin, blackjack, post and bur. Oak trees an important part of the ecosystem as a variety of wildlife feed on the acorns. Oaks are also an important timber species.

State Quarter

theus50.com

The Iowa quarter design features a one-room schoolhouse with a teacher and students planting a tree, and the inscriptions “Foundation in Education” and “Grant Wood.” The design is based on “Arbor Day,” a painting by Grant Wood, who was born near Anamosa, Iowa. He spent his career as a proponent of small-town values, which he celebrated in the iconic images of small-town plain folk and verdant Midwestern vistas for which he is world-renowned.

Iowans have had a commitment to education since the State’s earliest days. When Iowa became a state in 1846, it already had a number of rural country schools in each of its counties. Iowa established its first high school in the 1850s, although high schools generally did not become widespread in the United States until after 1900. Private and public colleges also quickly took root in the new State.

Although Iowa has long been a leader in agriculture, the State is unique in that it is the only one whose east and west borders are completely formed by rivers – the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.

Capital: Des Moines

Nickname: Hawkeye State
How Iowa became known as “the Hawkeye State” is complex. In 1826 American author James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Last of the Mohicans; the main character is a white marksman who is given the honorary nickname “Hawkeye” by the Delaware people in recognition of his talents. In 1833 the Black Hawk War broke out. An Iowa newspaper publisher decided to change the name of his paper to The Hawk-eye to commemorate an Indian warrior, Black Hawk. This would eventually lead to Iowa becoming “The Hawkeye State”.

Motto: Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain

Iowa Facts and Trivia

As a Midwestern state, Iowa forms a bridge between the forests of the east and the grasslands of the high prairie plains to the west. Its gently rolling landscape rises slowly as it extends westward from the Mississippi River, which forms its entire eastern border. The Missouri River and its tributary, the Big Sioux, form the western border, making Iowa the only U.S. state that has two parallel rivers defining its borders. Iowa is bounded by the states of Minnesota to the north, Wisconsin and Illinois to the east, Missouri to the south, and Nebraska and South Dakota to the west.

The name Iowa comes from Ioway, the French word for the Bah-kho-je Indian tribe that lived in the area. What the word means depends on who you ask.

One pioneer in the area wrote in 1868 that “some Indians in search of a new home encamped on a high bluff of the Iowa River near its mouth…and being much pleased with the location and the country around it, in their native dialect exclaimed, ‘Iowa, Iowa, Iowa’ (beautiful, beautiful, beautiful), hence the name Iowa to the river and to those Indians.” A report from the 1879 General Assembly of Iowa translated the word a little differently and claimed it meant “the beautiful land.” However, members of the Ioway Nation, who today inhabit Kansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma, will tell you that Ioway is the French spelling of Ayuhwa, a name meaning “sleepy ones” given to the tribe in jest by the Dakota Sioux. (The Ioway refer to themselves as Baxoje (bah-ko-jay) or “the gray/ashy heads,” a name that stems from an incident where tribe members were camping in the Iowa River valley and a gust of wind blew sand and campfire ashes onto their heads.)

Sergeant Charles Floyd was the only member of the Corps of Discovery to die during the Lewis and Clark expedition exploring the unchartered West. On August 20, 1804, he succumbed to infection caused by a ruptured appendix. A 100-foot obelisk marks his final resting place in Sioux City.

Iowa and Missouri almost went to war in the 1830s due to a surveying mistake. One surveyor’s boundary line was four miles further north on the east side than the west; another official was sent to resurvey, but his line was uneven to the tune of 2,600 acres. When a Missouri tax collector tried to cash in from citizens who lived in the disputed acres, an Iowan sheriff arrested him. The governors of each state threatened each other with combat, with militias and volunteers called to gather at the border. Before any shots were fired, the federal government stepped in and literally drew the line.

The conflict is often referred to as “The Honey War” because a copse of trees containing a large number of honeybees was destroyed during the dispute.

When the Winnebago Indians were forced to leave their homeland in Wisconsin in 1840, the U.S. government offered the tribe protection on their new temporary land in Iowa from other tribes and illegal settlers. Completed in 1842, Fort Atkinson was the only fort built by the United States to protect one Indian tribe from another.

One of Iowa’s most popular and iconic events is its state fair. The Iowa State Fair began as a rather small event in the 1850s. Today the fair attracts over a million visitors each year. Perhaps its most famous feature is its annual butter sculpture; every year since 1911 sculptors have made elaborate sculptures out of butter ranging from John Deere tractors to Da Vinci’s Last Supper. The state fair is the setting of the musical State Fair.

Clear Lake, Iowa, was the site of the infamous plane crash that killed the 1950s rock icons Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper on Feb 3, 1959.

Another one of Iowa’s claims to fame is that they are the first state in the country to get engaged in the presidential process. Political caucuses are a kind preliminary election; unlike the better known “primary,” a caucus is only available to registered party members. The Iowa Caucuses are special because they are the first test for candidates to gauge their chances at being nominated for the presidency. If a candidate performs poorly in their party’s caucus, they will often withdraw from the race in a matter of days. In 1972, Iowa was the first state to hold their Democratic caucus, and had the first Republican caucus four years later.

It’s home to the house in Grant Wood’s American Gothic. Wood sketched the house when he passed through Eldon, Iowa, in 1930, struck by the contradiction of the modest Midwestern house with rather fancy windows. He painted the home back at his studio, then added the dour-looking man and woman, modeled after his dentist and his sister, respectively.

Ripley’s Believe It or Not has dubbed Burlington’s Snake Alley the most crooked street in the world.

Crystal Lake is home to a statue of the world’s largest bullhead fish.

Iowa is the largest producer of corn in the United States

Though the 1995 movie was based on a book of fiction by Robert James Waller, the setting for The Bridges of Madison County is real. There were originally 19 covered bridges from the 1800s in the county, but only six remain today. Imes Bridge is the oldest; Holliwell Bridge is the longest .

Quaker Oats, in Cedar Rapids, is the largest cereal company in the world.

Dubuque is home to the only county courthouse with a gold dome.

Knoxville’s National Sprint Car Hall of Fame and Museum is the only museum in the country dedicated to preserving the history of sprint car racing.

Winnebago campers and motor homes are manufactured in Winnebago County.

Iowa is the only state whose east and west borders are 100% formed by water. Missouri and Mississippi rivers.

Iowa is the home of MASH character Radar O’Reilly and the locale of “Field of Dreams”

Actor Rob Lowe was playing in a PGA Pro-Am celebrity golf tournament in West Des Moines when a golf ball he had just hit struck and killed a goldfinch in mid-flight. Actuaries actually calculated the odds of him going to Iowa and killing the state bird with a golf ball: 1 in 747 million.

In 2016 the winners of the Iowa Caucus were Hillary Clinton (D) and Ted Cruz (R). Donald Trump won the election in Iowa with 51.2% of the vote. Hillary Clinton received 41.7% of the vote. Trump carried Iowa by the largest margin of any Republican candidate since Ronald Reagan in 1980. Trump enjoyed the support of working-class whites in the agricultural industry, as well as the endorsements of Iowa’s GOP establishment. The difference of 9.4% points was the largest winning margin for Trump in a state that had voted for Barack Obama four year earlier. Trump carried 93 out of 99 counties.

Iowa has its share of unusual laws:

It is illegal for a mustached man to kiss a woman in public.
It is illegal for a kiss to last longer than 5 minutes.
It is illegal to sell drugs without a drug tax stamp.
It is a crime to use a dead person’s handicapped parking sign or license plate
Ministers must obtain a permit to carry their liquor across state lines.
In Cedar Rapids it’s illegal to read a person’s palms in the city limits.
In Ottumwa, a man may not wink at any woman he does not know.
In Marshalltown, horses are forbidden to eat fire hydrants.
BONUS! The Iowa Legislature once passed a resolution ordering the state cafeteria to start serving cornbread.

When it comes to civil rights, Iowa has always been ahead of the curve. Married women received property rights in 1851, and in 1869, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled that women should be allowed to practice law, making Iowan Arabella Mansfield the first female lawyer in the U.S. The state was also way ahead on school desegregation: The Iowa Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” schools were unlawful back in 1868, 85 years before Brown v. Board of Education decided the same thing on a federal level in 1954.

Music:

The Iowa State Song
Iowa, Dar Williams
The Iowa Song, Josh Connor
It Sure Can Get Cold In Des Moines, Tom T. Hall
The Dry Cleaner From Des Moines, Joni Mitchell
Iowa Stubborn, from “The Music Man”
The Iowa Indian Song, Bing Crosby
The Iowa Waltz, Greg Brown
Iowa Gold, Jane Roman Pitt

People:

• Fran Allison, television personality (of Kukla, Fran, and Ollie fame)
• Johnny Carson, TV entertainer
• William Buffalo Bill Cody, scout
• Mamie Doud Eisenhower’s birthplace is located in Boone and includes a restored frame house, complete with summer kitchen and original furniture from the family.
• Van Meter is the hometown of baseball’s Bob Feller, an Iowa farm boy who went on to greatness with the Cleveland Indians during the Golden Age of baseball.
• William Frawley, actor
• Robert Frost, poet
• George H. Gallup, poll taker
• Herbert Hoover, a West Branch native, was the 31st president of the United States and the first one born west of the Mississippi.
• Ann Landers, columnist (identical twin to Abigail Van Buren)
• Cloris Leachman, actress
• John L. Lewis, labor leader
• Glenn Miller, noted trombonist and orchestra leader, was born in Clarinda located in Southwest Iowa.
• Harriet Nelson, actress
• Harry Reasoner, TV commentator
• Born Donnabelle Mullenger in Denison, Oscar Award-winning actress, Donna Reed, started her career at the young age of 16.
• Lillian Russell, soprano
• Billy Sunday, evangelist
• Abigail Van Buren, columnist (identical twin to Ann Landers)
• Henry A. Wallace, statesman
• Born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, John Wayne was the son of a pharmacist and grew up to become one of Hollywood’s most popular movie stars.
• Andy Williams, singer

Credits:

See 50 states.com
See ducksters.com
See infoplease.com
See mentalfloss.com
See onlyinyourstate.com/iowa; a terrific website to find places to go and things to do in Iowa!
See History.com
See Mental floss.com/how-all-50-states-got-their-names