Iowa City, IA
Seven villages in eastern Iowa founded in the 1850s by the Community of True Inspiration, German religious refugees who built one of the longest-lasting communal societies in American history — for nearly 80 years the Amana people held all property in common, ate in communal kitchens, and ran the farms and woolen mills together. They reorganized in 1932 (the "Great Change") into a profit-sharing corporation, and the Amana Society still operates; the appliance brand Amana started here. The well-preserved brick and clapboard villages, with their communal kitchens, the Amana Woolen Mill, and the German food and crafts, are a National Historic Landmark — a living window into 19th-century communal life set among the Iowa River farmland.
If you've flown behind a radio or a nav box in the last sixty years, there's a good chance its lineage traces to this campus in Cedar Rapids. Arthur A. Collins started building radios here in the 1930s; Collins gear went on to fly on essentially every American combat aircraft from WWII through Vietnam, carried the voices of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts, and evolved into the avionics that fill modern cockpit panels. The Collins Aerospace Museum, run by retirees through the Arthur A. Collins Legacy Association, preserves that lineage — the 1930s amateur-radio sets that first made the company's name, the original Autotune mechanism, the spacecraft communications boxes whose serial numbers tracked every astronaut's voice, and the C-System computing platform Arthur Collins bet the company on. The catch is access: the museum sits inside an active aerospace campus that handles classified work, so you cannot walk up. Visits must be arranged in advance through the Legacy Association and require photo ID and security registration — plan at least two weeks ahead. For a pilot curious about where the equipment in the panel actually came from, it's worth the paperwork.
Arsenal Island sits in the middle of the Mississippi River between Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa — 946 acres of land at the strategic point where the Mississippi makes its sharpest east-flowing turn. Fort Armstrong was built here in 1816, named for Secretary of War John Armstrong. During the Civil War the island held one of the largest Confederate prisoner-of-war camps in the North — roughly 12,000 prisoners passed through and about 1,961 died of disease. The Confederate Cemetery is on the south side of the island, alongside the Rock Island National Cemetery for Union dead. Rock Island Arsenal was established in 1862 by act of Congress. It is still active — the largest government-owned and operated arsenal in the United States, employing 6,000+ people in the Quad Cities area. The 19th-century limestone arsenal shops on the east end of the island were designated a National Historic Landmark district in 1989. Two pieces of American transportation history happened here. In 1856 the first railroad bridge ever built across the Mississippi River was completed at Rock Island. Two weeks after it opened, the steamboat Effie Afton hit one of its pillars; both the boat and a span of the bridge caught fire. The Effie Afton sank and her owners sued the railroad. The case was tried in Chicago in 1857, and the railroad's lawyer was Abraham Lincoln. The jury hung, leaving the bridge standing. The principle that bridges could be built across navigable rivers was established for the rest of the country. Lock and Dam 15, immediately downstream of the island, is the largest roller dam in the world: 1,203 feet long, nine 109-foot roller gates plus two overflow gates. Built 1932-34, it was the first of 29 lock-and-dam complexes in the Upper Mississippi Nine-Foot Channel Project — the New Deal-era engineering project that converted 650 miles of free-flowing river into a controlled commercial waterway between St. Louis and Minneapolis.
A small white Carpenter Gothic farmhouse with a single distinctive Gothic Revival window — built in 1881 by Charles Dibble in Eldon, Iowa. In August 1930, Grant Wood, then a 39-year-old painter living in Cedar Rapids, was driving through Eldon and spotted the house. He decided the building "looked the kind of place where the sort of people I am going to paint would live." He returned home, used his sister Nan and the family dentist Byron McKeeby as models for the two figures, and painted "American Gothic" — the most parodied painting in American art. It debuted at the Art Institute of Chicago later in 1930 and won a $300 prize. The house is in Eldon (population ~900), a small town in southeast Iowa, 14 miles southeast of Ottumwa. It is owned by the State Historical Society of Iowa as the American Gothic House Center, with an exhibit center next door and costumes available for visitors to pose in the iconic style — pitchfork, apron, and round-collared coat. The painting itself remains at the Art Institute of Chicago.