Shannon’s gig at the University of Iowa Hospital ended on Friday, July 24 and after a busy day of packing up RIGBY on Saturday and enjoying a taco feast with our friends Sam, Rachel and Lisa, we hit the road Sunday morning.
Our original plan was was to head up to Wisconsin to see Racine and Hartland where Tim’s folks grew up, but the midwest combination of heat and humidity has driven us away. We need to find cooler climes where we sweat on our terms.
So instead we headed north to Waterloo and then west along highway 3 (we’ve found we like to avoid interstates when we have time) and made our way to Humboldt, Iowa. Shannon had heard from her dad that years ago he had gone to a funeral for his grandfather in Iowa, and her friend at work had told her about findagrave.com.
Along the way we saw a few more bike paths and were again impressed with how much biking infrastructure we’ve seen in Iowa.
Union Cemetery in Humboldt is a lot larger than we expected and we were quite daunted trying to find our way around. A map in the back showed some information, but nothing to orient you as to which direction was which and to make things worse, only some of the sections had markers indicating their section number. So after about 30 minutes of traipsing around we called it quits.
We found a nice little campground just south of Humboldt (Frank Gotch State Park) where east and west forks combine to become the Des Moines river, and paid for one night. Cell service (and therefore wifi from our phones’ personal hotspots) was pretty low, so we tried our signal booster for the first time and were impressed that we went from 2 bars to 4 bars. This got Shannon online sleuthing how to find graves and she came up with a new plan.
It was such a nice quiet campground we paid for a second night and decided to give the cemetery another chance. We checked to see if there was a reasonable way to get to the cemetery by bikes and discovered the Three Rivers Trail that went past the campground about 50 feet behind our campsite, and all the way into town (except for a portion that a local farmer did not allow so we had to ride the road for that part).
At the cemetery, Shannon’s sleuthing was successful and she found Great-Great-Great-Grandfather (wait for it…) CHESTER’S grave! Chester Dean, born in 1836, died in 1882. And what a monument on his grave – 134 years old and difficult to read the etching of his name, but that was it!
We also found Great-Great-Grandfather Frank Dean’s grave over in a different section so it was a very successful excursion.
Another night at Frank Gotch State Park and off to Nebraska on Tuesday. To be continued…
1 thought on “On The Road Again”
Good blog. As a former Iowa resident, I enjoyed it. When my Mom was 75 (only 3 yrs more than my current age!) she and I took a week trip to Montana to hit some mining towns and ghost towns and U. of Montana library and land records office in Phillipsburg and some steep mountain one-lane dirt roads at the upper reaches of Bear Gulch. But it was the Missoula city cemetery where she found her great, great Uncle’s grave stone. Very close it was to the style of the limestone one Shannon is standing by. That uncle was the old bachelor German miner who helped found the 1st Bank of Missoula and the relative my Grandfather at age 16 was sent to America to find and work so he too could ‘get the gold.’ My Mom was so touched.
Later, when struggling thru the brush at the toe of a steep, large hill next on the ranch in the valley where the miner Uncle would retreat to when the Winter closed in, she and I cut thru some berry vines to expose the old root cellar, a cold cellar, where the heavily salted meats were stored.
We got the door open to enter a small room that smelled and looked like it was sealed the day before. No moisture. Clean. She cried, and then cried some more because her Father had told her about how rancid and bad tasting was the rotten meat they would eat from that same cellar. As a civilized, educated and gentle German kid from a farm 30 miles west of Hamburg, he was appalled because in Germany then they knew what good sausage was and how to preserve it.
Thanks for your Blog. Dave Z.