Why did Iowa's growth stalled?

[EastAnglianLefty]

^ Overall, I’m sure there’s a correlation, but the fastest growing county in Iowa voted for Trump twice.

~But Trends~ incoming.

Well. it went from Romney +12 to Trump +2 so it's almost there.

Lol, this is not like a replacement for the fact that it’s a Republican-leaning county.

Yes, but it's now close enough that if the previous trend continues it won't be Republican-leaning for long. The number of votes cast in the county is increasing, but Republican raw margins are shrinking.

[jimrtex]

I have fairly deep roots in IA - my father's family is from the Cedar Rapids area and I spent two years of my youth living in Des Moines. The stalled growth doesn't seem to be related to industry. IA has maintained significant facilities in food production and distribution, heavy manufacturing (John Deere makes its tractors in Waterloo/Cedar Falls), and even aerospace (Collins, formerly Rockwell, employs almost 10 K in Cedar Rapids). Newton IA lost the Maytag plant, but now hosts wind turbine manufacturing that employs about as many people. Des Moines has long had a good share of insurance firms with major offices.

What I think is missing is that neither Des Moines nor Cedar Rapids became a major transportation hub for Midwestern agribusiness. Those roles fell to Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Omaha. It seems that a junction between railroads and a major river or Great Lake was necessary. Davenport and the Quad Cities might have fit the bill, but historically the main rail lines crossed the Mississippi north of the Quad Cities at Clinton or to the south at Burlington. Even today the Amtrak stop for Des Moines is in Osceola, 40 miles to the south.

How much Czech (Bohemian) culture is there in Cedar Rapids? I was noticing in the 1900 Census there was a bit of a cluster in Linn, Johnson, and Tama counties? Kolaches? Runzas?

This map suggests that Davenport-Rock Island was sort of a mini-hub for Iowa, but the CRIP never reached the Pacific, even though the bridge between Rock Island and Davenport was the first over the Mississippi.

https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd415:g4151:g4151p:rr002190/full/pct:12.5/0/default.jpg

Amtrak likely selected the BNSF (CBQ) route across Iowa since they want the train to go through the Rockies (the westbound train leaves Denver in the AM so it is daylight). If efficiency were an issue, I'd take the UP route and make the Des Moines stop in Ames.

Incidentally, I-80 from Chicago to San Francisco is 20 hours faster (30h45m vs 51h05m) and about 10% shorter (2127 mi v. 2440 mil) than the train.

When a hyperloop is built from San Francisco to New York, would it use a great-circle route at 0 elevation? It happens that Chicago is quite close to the SF-NYC great circle, so it could be connected by a vertical shaft of around 600 feet.

[muon2]

I have fairly deep roots in IA - my father's family is from the Cedar Rapids area and I spent two years of my youth living in Des Moines. The stalled growth doesn't seem to be related to industry. IA has maintained significant facilities in food production and distribution, heavy manufacturing (John Deere makes its tractors in Waterloo/Cedar Falls), and even aerospace (Collins, formerly Rockwell, employs almost 10 K in Cedar Rapids). Newton IA lost the Maytag plant, but now hosts wind turbine manufacturing that employs about as many people. Des Moines has long had a good share of insurance firms with major offices.

What I think is missing is that neither Des Moines nor Cedar Rapids became a major transportation hub for Midwestern agribusiness. Those roles fell to Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Omaha. It seems that a junction between railroads and a major river or Great Lake was necessary. Davenport and the Quad Cities might have fit the bill, but historically the main rail lines crossed the Mississippi north of the Quad Cities at Clinton or to the south at Burlington. Even today the Amtrak stop for Des Moines is in Osceola, 40 miles to the south.

How much Czech (Bohemian) culture is there in Cedar Rapids? I was noticing in the 1900 Census there was a bit of a cluster in Linn, Johnson, and Tama counties? Kolaches? Runzas?

This map suggests that Davenport-Rock Island was sort of a mini-hub for Iowa, but the CRIP never reached the Pacific, even though the bridge between Rock Island and Davenport was the first over the Mississippi.

https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd415:g4151:g4151p:rr002190/full/pct:12.5/0/default.jpg

Amtrak likely selected the BNSF (CBQ) route across Iowa since they want the train to go through the Rockies (the westbound train leaves Denver in the AM so it is daylight). If efficiency were an issue, I'd take the UP route and make the Des Moines stop in Ames.

Incidentally, I-80 from Chicago to San Francisco is 20 hours faster (30h45m vs 51h05m) and about 10% shorter (2127 mi v. 2440 mil) than the train.

When a hyperloop is built from San Francisco to New York, would it use a great-circle route at 0 elevation? It happens that Chicago is quite close to the SF-NYC great circle, so it could be connected by a vertical shaft of around 600 feet.

Before Amtrak there were competing routes between Chicago and San Francisco. The northern route through IA or the CNW later the Milwaukee Road connected to the UP at Omaha (the UP only acquired the track to Chicago in 1995) and used the Overland Route through Cheyenne similar to that of I-80 connecting finally to the SP at Ogden. The southern route through IA was operated by the CB&Q to Denver connecting to the D&RGW, and finally via the WP past Salt Lake City. There was a third Chicago to San Francisco passenger route on the AT&SF that went south through New Mexico, but didn't include IA.

Amtrak only kept one of those three after it was created. I suspect that the California Zephyr was picked because of the value of passengers going to and from Denver over any city on the other routes. I had the pleasure of taking the Cal Zephyr in 2018 between Naperville IL and Glenwood Springs CA. It may be a longer route, but the scenery west of Denver was spectacular, and better than anything I could see on I-80.

[jimrtex]

Yes, the rather sharp population decline in percentage terms in the 1880's is puzzling. I don't know what happened and googling around has not revealed the answer. It may be that in the 1880's the farm development had been maxed out, but cheaper rail rates and high corn prices caused a temporary bubble during the 1890's that caused the temporary spike up in the census of 1900.

I know that the farm price parity point for ag subsidies was around 1900, and that by inference my great grandparents must have made good money off their farm in the 1890's, because they retired to town in 1906, having bought more upland acreage that included the historic home to which they retired, and hired others to work the land from there on out. So it must have been a very prosperous time for farming.

Iowa declined in population between 1900 and 1910. 71 of 99 counties had a decline. This was the beginning of the population stabilization that the OP noted. Looking through the 1910 Census reports, I haven't yet found a good explanation. There was one suggestion that farmers had emigrated further west. The Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas had quite healthy growth, and that was after Nebraska and Kansas had slower growth in the 1890-1900 decade. Missouri was also quite low in 1900 to 1910, but may have been kept positive by St. Louis and Kansas City. The Census report also suggested Canada (Prairie Provinces) as a destination.

It was apparently a good time for farm prices as $$$/acreage increased throughout the US, and the peak appreciation was in Iowa (127%). This might indicate farmers had begun to buy up neighbor's land and there was competition (demand) for something which supply was essentially constant ("they aren't making any more land"). In 1909 the homestead allotment was increased to 320 acres but this was further west. The person who had homesteaded your upland acreage might have found it non-viable and sold out and moved to Nebraska or the Dakotas.

Madison County has 16 townships of 36 square miles each. Subdivided into 160-acre homesteads that works out to 2304 farm families. Even with larger families that might only work out to 15,000 or so. Even if a family had 5 or 6 children, they would be pushed off the farm when they reached adulthood (which might be considered much earlier than now, given the lack of education). The youngest son might take over the farm for his aging father or widowed mother, and some of the daughters would be married to neighbors. Everyone else would have to find work in Winterset, or Des Moines, perhaps on a railroad, or migrate out of the state.

The Homestead Act was passed in 1862. Settlement of Iowa had begun before the Civil War, but not by much. Land could be bought from the US Government but the minimum lot size had been reduced to 40 acres to make it available for starter farms. Being able to buy 160 acres for sweat equity would have a great incentive to move to Iowa after the war. The Homestead Act required building improvements and living on the land for five years to perfect the claim. Perhaps the hiccup in the 1880s was somehow tied to this. It did not show up in Dallas and Adair which were still being filled in during this time. Settlement in the extreme northwestern part of the state was still going on into the 20th Century.

Anyhow that smaller lot size may have led to denser settlement in the Old Northwest, and also made the farms closer to subsistence farming. Before railroads it would be hard to transport your produce to market. But when industrialization came there would be a larger labor supply in Ohio. Iowa was settled after development of mechanical reapers and threshers, which would permit harvesting of larger farms by fewer persons.

Madison County probably was held back by lack of an east-west railroad through that tier of counties.

[jimrtex]

I have fairly deep roots in IA - my father's family is from the Cedar Rapids area and I spent two years of my youth living in Des Moines. The stalled growth doesn't seem to be related to industry. IA has maintained significant facilities in food production and distribution, heavy manufacturing (John Deere makes its tractors in Waterloo/Cedar Falls), and even aerospace (Collins, formerly Rockwell, employs almost 10 K in Cedar Rapids). Newton IA lost the Maytag plant, but now hosts wind turbine manufacturing that employs about as many people. Des Moines has long had a good share of insurance firms with major offices.

What I think is missing is that neither Des Moines nor Cedar Rapids became a major transportation hub for Midwestern agribusiness. Those roles fell to Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, and Omaha. It seems that a junction between railroads and a major river or Great Lake was necessary. Davenport and the Quad Cities might have fit the bill, but historically the main rail lines crossed the Mississippi north of the Quad Cities at Clinton or to the south at Burlington. Even today the Amtrak stop for Des Moines is in Osceola, 40 miles to the south.

How much Czech (Bohemian) culture is there in Cedar Rapids? I was noticing in the 1900 Census there was a bit of a cluster in Linn, Johnson, and Tama counties? Kolaches? Runzas?

This map suggests that Davenport-Rock Island was sort of a mini-hub for Iowa, but the CRIP never reached the Pacific, even though the bridge between Rock Island and Davenport was the first over the Mississippi.

https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd415:g4151:g4151p:rr002190/full/pct:12.5/0/default.jpg

Amtrak likely selected the BNSF (CBQ) route across Iowa since they want the train to go through the Rockies (the westbound train leaves Denver in the AM so it is daylight). If efficiency were an issue, I'd take the UP route and make the Des Moines stop in Ames.

Incidentally, I-80 from Chicago to San Francisco is 20 hours faster (30h45m vs 51h05m) and about 10% shorter (2127 mi v. 2440 mil) than the train.

When a hyperloop is built from San Francisco to New York, would it use a great-circle route at 0 elevation? It happens that Chicago is quite close to the SF-NYC great circle, so it could be connected by a vertical shaft of around 600 feet.

Before Amtrak there were competing routes between Chicago and San Francisco. The northern route through IA or the CNW later the Milwaukee Road connected to the UP at Omaha (the UP only acquired the track to Chicago in 1995) and used the Overland Route through Cheyenne similar to that of I-80 connecting finally to the SP at Ogden. The southern route through IA was operated by the CB&Q to Denver connecting to the D&RGW, and finally via the WP past Salt Lake City. There was a third Chicago to San Francisco passenger route on the AT&SF that went south through New Mexico, but didn't include IA.

Amtrak only kept one of those three after it was created. I suspect that the California Zephyr was picked because of the value of passengers going to and from Denver over any city on the other routes. I had the pleasure of taking the Cal Zephyr in 2018 between Naperville IL and Glenwood Springs CA. It may be a longer route, but the scenery west of Denver was spectacular, and better than anything I could see on I-80.

The route through Colorado is actually quite new. The original route was from Pueblo through the Royal Gorge and over Tennessee Pass and eventually to Salt Lake City.

A direct route west from Denver went over Rollins Pass at nearly 12,000 feet, and even then only reached Craig. The Moffat Tunnel was completed in 1928 and the the Dotsero Cutoff connecting to the D&RGW mainline was completed in 1934. The D&RGW later acquired the D&SL. Apparently, the California Zephyr was never competitive with the City of San Francisco over the Union Pacific tracks through Wyoming, so it was always billed as more of a tourist route.

Incidentally, there is a quite current effort to reopen the Tennessee Pass line. It is not clear what the interest is, I don't think that there would be traffic for transcontinental freight - you are either going through Wyoming or New Mexico or Montana depending on whether you are coming from Oakland, Los Angeles, Seattle, or Portland. But it could be used as commuter rail from Salida and Leadville into Vail - which is more astonishing to me than commuting from Stockton into San Jose or Poconos into NYC.

The Rock Island tracks across Iowa are now operated by the Iowa Interstate Railroad, which also goes as far east as Bureau, IL with trackage rights into Chicago.

This talks about reviving rail service (a lot of blue sky thinking).

https://iowadot.gov/iowainmotion/railplan/2017/IowaSRP2017_Ch3.pdf

The first stage would be Chicago to Moline, but you probably know about that since the state of Illinois is involved. The next extension would be to Iowa City - with some sort of connector service to Cedar Rapids; and then Des Moines, and eventually Council Bluffs. One clear limitation is that freight trains are currently limited to 40 MPH, and dual trackage or at least sidings would be needed to be added.

This is conceivably the reason that the BNSF was chosen over the UP from Chicago to Omaha. It might have been easier for Amtrack to get trackage rights. Though it could also be that the BNSF route is more scenic - because it is clearly crookeder, and there might be the traditional aspect for nostalgia reasons even if you are mainly interested in the Rockies.

The above article did mention a Madison County Express excursion train that ran from Chicago to Earlham, IA, but I could not find anything since the late 1990s. Apparently it was for tours of ancestral Torie homestead, as well as the covered bridges. Another version was the Madison County Limited which went to Osceola. That could have just been a special version of the California Zephyr.

Incidentally, the Southwest Chief crosses the Mississippi at Fort Madison, so it nicks the Iowa Panhandle/Nubbin(?). Does the eastern protrusion of Iowa have a popular name? I've always thought of it as a nose.

[Torie]

I just found this a fascinating story (for me) of the county of my material grandfather's birth, Montgomery County, Iowa. It is a detailed study of ethnicity, class, geographic divide (including neighborhood divides in the city of Red Oak itself, based on not only money but social standing), and social mobility, or, much more often, the lack thereof. The ethnic groups did not intermarry. The elite were the New England Yankees. Next down the food chain were the Yankees from Ohio and PA from selected counties.  Then a more mixed bunch of American born immigrants, called "native Americans." The non "natives" including the Swedes, who lived mostly apart in seperate townships, and tended to hang around more and expand, and had some financial success, but did not mix much with the Yankees, particularly the Yankee elite.

And finally, the NW corner township of Lincoln was Welsh (with a hamlet named Wales). The first wave of Welsh were minors from the Scranton-Wilkes Barre area. They worked hard, farming, and when the crops were harvested, went back to the PA mines to work until it was time to return the following spring to plant another crop. Their issue would leave to go West for better land on the plains, or so they thought, searching for that perfect quarter section, to be replaced by new Welsh immigrants (sort of like the Bangladesh in Hudson NY, who kids leave, to be replaced by new immigrants from the home country). They kept to themselves and their Welsh Presbyterian church, never merging with the Yankee dominated Presbyterian Church.

My great grandfather was an immigrant from one of the named Ohio Counties, Clark, in looking that up. He moved to Montgomery County at about age 20, and married the daughter of one of the very first settlers, whose family owned quite a bit of land one sees on plat maps from a bit later. I was told by my grandmother, that my grandfather's mother was a school teacher in Red Oak. I now know why for the first time. Her husband died in 1891, at age 42, and his wife had to go to work to feed the six kids. And that was how she got the job as a school teacher. Married women were not allowed to work because it was viewed that they would be taking a job away from someone who needed it to survive or care for the family. (My grandmother had the same problem, but that is another story. She managed in a couple of cases to get a job anyway, because she was fluent in Latin.)  How my great grandmother was able to send my grandfather to college I don't know. Maybe he got the then equivalent of a football scholarship, at which he was talented. When I lived with my grandparents in Davenport for six months at age 4, I remember he had high hopes that I would be a football player too, since I was a big kid. He died the next year, so he never found out that I was not a jock type.

Anyway it is a tale of class barriers, and social barriers, and ethnic barriers, that were quite impermeable, at least according to this highly detailed paper.

Montgomery County too had a dip in population in 1890, although very slight, before it also rebounded in the 1900 census, to then as was the pattern gradually decline.

The story begins on page 46, after some boring academic chatter, and soon gets into the internecine fight for where the railroad line and depot would go - a fight  as it turned out to the death between the two hamlet - literally. Red Oak won, and then a few years later grabbed the county seat label as well, from the loser, Frankfort, which then crumbled to the ground  and into dust without much further ado.

https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/studentwork/524/