Iowa Highway Ends (etc.)

September 28, 2025: The Mitchell County Courthouse in Osage.

A recent story about county courthouses says the newest one is in Pottawattamie County in 1978. This is wrong, twice over.

Dickinson County built a new courthouse in stages in 2006 and 2009. All county offices and the jail are part of the facility in Spirit Lake. It is much larger than the previous one, as the county’s population is much bigger than it was in the 1860s, in addition to holding all services.

The Mitchell County Courthouse in Osage, built in 1858, had major issues in the early 2010s. It was vacated in 2013. The matter of whether to restore or replace got exceptionally heated. Two bond referendums failed, but the county supervisors moved forward with a different bonding method to build a new one anyway. The new courthouse opened in August 2015, and from the exterior, it’s designed to look as much like the old one as possible but with extensions (wings) on either side.

Maybe it takes someone who’s been to every county courthouse to know off the top of their head that Council Bluffs hasn’t had Iowa’s youngest courthouse for two decades.

I wrote 2200 words about five presentations in Ames on May 1. Well, technically, I wrote whatever percentage of those words are not from quoted material. Here’s the second part, and the story links to a full presentation about “streamliner” midcentury train engine design.

KTIV has two stories related to the Union Pacific’s Big Boy going through western Iowa on Sunday. The first is about the train’s stop in Carroll. The second, whose video plays after the first, is about maintenance of the train itself and the crew on the ride. For this year’s trip, celebrating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, Big Boy has some special logos, as seen in the videos.

The second story mentions that for the first time, Big Boy will continue east of Chicago, all the way to Philadelphia on July 4. Union Pacific is in the midst of trying to merge with Norfolk Southern to become the nation’s first truly transcontinental railroad, and Big Boy will be on NS’s rails from Chicago to Philadelphia. The UP’s press release says Big Boy “will be accompanied by Norfolk Southern commemorative locomotives as well as a historical passenger car from Norfolk Southern’s Heritage Fleet.”

However, once the train leaves Pennsylvania, there will be no stops open to the public until it gets back west of the Mississippi River.

Big Boy’s noon stop the next day was in Tama, where KCRG has a story. It paused for a shorter time in Belle Plaine, a reversal of 2024, a stop I wrote about.

As endorsed by former Des Moines Register editor and current president of the Iowa Freedom of Information Council, Randy Evans: “This is a very readable account of the role Iowa, and Iowans, played in slaves gaining their freedom in the dark days of American history. I invite you to brush up on your Iowa history.”