Quad City International

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.

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.

Caterpillar Inc. was created in 1925 by the merger of two California tractor companies — the Holt Manufacturing Company of Stockton and the C. L. Best Tractor Company of San Leandro. Holt had built the world's first commercially successful tracked tractor in 1904; legend has it that a Holt photographer watching the prototype crawl across a field said it moved "like a caterpillar," and the name stuck. The combined company moved its headquarters from California to Peoria in 1928 to be closer to its largest customer base, and Peoria has been the home of Caterpillar manufacturing and engineering for almost a century since. The Caterpillar Visitors Center opened in 2012 in a modern building on the downtown Peoria riverfront. Its centerpiece is a real Cat 797F Mining Truck — one of the largest production trucks in the world. The 797F carries a 400-ton payload, weighs 1,400 tons fully loaded, runs on 24-foot Michelin tires (each tire weighs 12,000 pounds and costs about $42,000), and burns one gallon of diesel per quarter-mile. Visitors can climb into the cab. The bed of the truck has been converted into a small theater — the "Future Theater" — where a film about Cat's role in global infrastructure plays. The Heritage Gallery traces the company from the 1904 Holt tractor through the British Mark I tank of WWI (which used Holt-style continuous tracks), through the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal widening, the Three Gorges Dam, and into modern autonomous mining and electrification. Admission is free. The Center is open Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 3:30pm. Note: Caterpillar moved its corporate headquarters to suburban Chicago (Deerfield) in 2017 and again to Irving, Texas in 2022. Manufacturing, engineering, the world headquarters of the Cat Foundation, and most senior R&D remain in the Peoria area.

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.