Moving to Iowa - Des Moines, Cedar Rapids, Iowa City, Dubuque

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Iowa, in the heart of the Midwest, is a state in transition. Its location marks a transition from the eastern hardwood forests in its northeast to the prairies that stretch westward to the Rockies. With agricultural industries in its eastern cities, particularly Waterloo and Davenport, it marks a transition between the eastern manufacturing belt and the less industrial West. The state is currently in transition from an agricultural economic base, both in terms of production and a whole array of agribusiness, to a more diversified economy. Iowa is the land between the rivers--the Missouri and the Mississippi. It is bordered by Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois, and Wisconsin.
LAND AND RESOURCES
Topography and Soils
Iowa's geological base is sedimentary rock laid down when much of North America was covered by an ancient sea. After the continent rose above sea level, erosion dissected what was essentially a plateau. Surface evidence of this process remains only in northeast Iowa, part of the Driftless Area that escaped glaciation during the Pleistocene (Ice Age). Glacial activity rearranged the landscape in much of the rest of the state. The Des Moines Lobe, a depositional feature in north central Iowa, is a flat area with poor drainage. Windblown loess deposits formed hills in western Iowa, and southern Iowa, not affected by the last continental glacier, has eroded into rolling to fairly steep hills. Iowa ranges in elevation from a high of 509 m (1,670 ft) in the northwest to a low of 146 m (480 ft) in the southeast. The average elevation is 335 m (1,100 ft), which is about the height of the bluffs along the Mississippi in the northeast.
Rich, dark, deep (0.6-m/2-ft) prairie soils, high in organic content, cover most of the state. In fact, Iowa has more prime agricultural soil, mostly concentrated in the Des Moines Lobe than any other state. Soil quality is less and the color lighter to the south and east. Because of glaciation, natural drainage is poor, leaving ponds and marshes, especially in the north and northwest.
Rivers and Lakes
In addition to Iowa's border rivers, there are several other rivers that have played a significant role in transportation and as energy sources. These interior streams range in length from the Des Moines at 692 km (430 mi) to some just a few kilometers in length. The Iowa, Cedar, Wapsipinicon, Maquoketa, Skunk, and Des Moines have extensive drainage basins. The Coralville, Rathbun, Red Rock, and Saylorville reservoirs provide flood management as well as recreation and are the largest bodies of water in eastern, southern, and central Iowa. Only northwestern Iowa has any significant natural lakes; these provide recreational activities.
Climate
Iowa has a continental climate with extremes in both temperature and precipitation, as well as a potential for violent storms. Summertime highs average in the high 20 degrees C (low 80 degrees F) but can reach into the high 30 degrees C (over 100 degrees F), accompanied by high humidity. The west tends to get higher temperatures, the east higher humidity. In some years periods of extended hot, humid conditions stress both crops and livestock. Average winter temperatures range from - 10 degrees C to - 4 degrees C (14 degrees F to 24 degrees F), but much colder temperatures can occur. The average frost-free season ranges from 140 days in the north to 170 days in the south.
Precipitation, usually occurring when moist air from the Gulf of Mexico meets colder air from the Pacific or Arctic, ranges from an annual average of 864 mm (34 in) in the southeast to 635 mm (25 in) in the northwest. The precipitation may be highly variable, with large amounts falling at once or with long periods of time between precipitation events. Thus, Iowa is susceptible to floods and droughts. Iowa also receives blizzards and tornadoes.
Vegetation and Animal Life
Iowa's native prairie and woodlands have largely given way to cropland and pastureland as Iowa has the highest percentage of land under cultivation of any state. Before European settlement most of Iowa was covered by prairie grasses with the rest mostly consisting of an oak-hickory hardwood forest. Today, some prairie remains but mainly as museum plots of limited size. Public programs support the reestablishment of prairie land.
Although the buffalo and cougar no longer roam freely in Iowa, the white-tailed deer population is greater than it was before European settlement. Public programs have successfully reintroduced wild turkeys, river otters, and peregrine falcons. Bald eagles, once threatened by DDT, thrive along the Mississippi. Game birds abound. The state has a colorful collection of native birds, both those residing throughout the year, such as cardinals, blue jays, and goldfinches, and those seasonally resident, such as orioles, bluebirds, indigo buntings, and scarlet tanagers.
Resources
Iowa's major natural resource relates to its agricultural productivity. The combination of soil, growing season, and available moisture makes Iowa a very productive area for nonirrigated agriculture. Iowa is poorly endowed with mineral resources. Sizable coal deposits of south central Iowa are too high in sulfur content to be of major importance. The state also has gypsum, building stone, and sand and gravel.
PEOPLE
Since the late 19th century Iowa has experienced out-migration--first as an outlet for rural youth in an era of large families, later as competition and technological change rendered small farms uneconomical. Generally, however, out-migration has been offset by natural increase.
From 1980 to 1990, however, Iowa experienced a substantial decline in population. Only seven of the state's 99 counties gained population during the decade, and five of these were clustered in the Des Moines metropolitan area. Iowa City, in the east, experienced the most growth, but adjacent Cedar Rapids and Waterloo, another eastern interior city, declined. The only nonmetropolitan county to grow was Henry County in southeast Iowa. By 1990, Iowa had one of the nation's highest percentages of people 75 years and older (7 percent).
The overwhelming majority of the Iowa population is native-born, many originally of German ethnic origin. German-speaking communities still exist in the Amana colonies (see Amana Society) of Iowa County and the Amish community of Johnson and Washington counties. Other European ethnic groups include Dutch, Norwegians, and Czechs. Blacks, with 1.7 percent of the population, are Iowa's largest minority population; modest black concentrations are in Davenport, Waterloo, and Des Moines. The Mesquakie Settlement in Tama County is home to American Indians. Muscatine County has a concentration of Hispanics, mainly working in meat-packing industries. Iowa's Asian population is concentrated in the university towns of Iowa City, Ames, and Cedar Falls. Most Iowans are Protestant, but Catholics constitute a majority in Dubuque. The Jewish population is concentrated in the larger cities. Cedar Rapids has a substantial Muslim community and the oldest continually operating U.S. Muslim congregation.
Education and Culture
The general level of education in Iowa is high. Iowa has the nation's lowest rate of adult illiteracy, and the state's students consistently rank at or near the top in standardized tests, including college entrance exams. Rural depopulation and rising curricular demands have led to several rounds of school consolidation, reducing the number of school districts to 425, with more consolidations expected. Even so, more than 100 districts have fewer than 250 pupils--kindergarten through high school--and the state has no high school with more than 2,000 students.
Two of Iowa's three state universities (see Iowa, state universities of) and many private colleges date from the mid 19th century. Iowa's flagship state university is the University of Iowa at Iowa City; its Writer's Workshop is renowned. Iowa City has become a retirement haven in recent years as well as a center for both high-tech and low-tech businesses.
Rather than build several additional state-supported schools, Iowa opted to subsidize its private institutions by giving tuition grants valid at any accredited college in the state to qualified Iowa residents. In recent decades Iowa's private colleges have prospered. There are also state-supported community colleges.
Museums, art festivals, and various art programs enrich Iowa life. The Bix Beiderbecke Jazz Festival in Davenport, Grant Wood Festival in Stone City, Nordic Fest in Decorah, and Iowa Arts Fest in Iowa City provide summer artistic experiences. Des Moines and Iowa City have important art museums, and the major state universities and the larger cities host plays and concerts throughout the year. There are symphony orchestras in several cities.
Iowa has several important historical sites, beginning with Effigy Mounds National Monument (see Mound Builders) north of Dubuque on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi. The site has prehistoric burial mounds, some in the form of animals and birds. West Branch in Cedar County is home to the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site that includes the presidential library and museum. Also noteworthy is the Old Capitol in Iowa City, the territorial capital. An active preservationist movement has restored and maintained historical buildings throughout the state.
Communications
Iowa has some 30 daily newspapers, although competition in particular cities has become rare. The state's largest newspaper is the Des Moines Register. The Cedar Rapids Gazette is one of the few that remains locally owned.
The Iowa Public Television Network completed its statewide network in the early 1970s. Since then satellite dishes and cable television also have brought more choices to Iowa viewers. The state has gained several radio stations, and others have been granted more broadcasting hours. The broadcast commercial television stations have divided the state into distinct regions, based in Davenport, Des Moines, Omaha, Sioux City, Cedar Rapids-Waterloo, and Ottumwa.
ECONOMIC ACTIVITY
Agriculture
Even with the changes that have occurred in this century Iowa is above all an agricultural state. In 1989, Iowa had 105,000 farms, one for every 27 Iowans. The state ranks along with California and Texas as a national leader in total farm income. Four commodities dominate: corn, soybeans, hogs, and cattle, and Iowa is by far the leading hog-producing state. Many farmers, particularly those concerned with the environmental effect of chemical farming, have moved toward low impact sustainable agriculture (LISA). State and federal officials have lagged behind progressive farm organizations in this movement, but it is gaining support. Also, meat producers have moved to reduce the fat content of their animals.
Manufacturing and Industry
Agriculturally oriented manufacturing remains an important component of the Iowa economy. The meat-packing business has changed dramatically since 1970. Major production facilities in Cedar Rapids, Ottumwa, Waterloo, and Dubuque have been idled as such traditional producers as Rath, Morrell, and Dubuque have gone out of business. IBP, originally Iowa Beef Processors, and ConAgra have emerged as the new giants in the industry. They have revolutionized production with efficient plants, marketing oriented to restaurants, and much lower labor costs.
There has also been change in the farm-implement business. Some firms have gone out of business. Others, including the giant John Deere, have reduced their work force. Production for agriculture has fallen in other product lines also. Firestone, for example, no longer produces tires in Iowa. The better news is in nonfarm production. Publishing is a growth area in the state as is the production of electrical products, and Iowa retains a portion of heavy-equipment production.
The Service Economy and Tourism
The Iowa service sector, which showed substantial growth in the 1980s, now employs more people than the agricultural or manufacturing sectors. Much of the service-sector growth has been in insurance and financial services, especially in Des Moines, which is second only to Hartford, Conn., as an insurance center.
Only in recent years has Iowa developed a significant tourism office. Cities offering tourist attractions include Des Moines and Iowa City. A major lure for visitors is riverboat gambling on the Mississippi.
Transportation
Waterloo was linked to the interstate highway system when I-380 reached it in 1986. Des Moines is served by Iowa's main east-west and north-south highways. I-80 also gives Omaha (Nebr.)-Council Bluffs, Iowa City, and Davenport access to national markets. The railroad now plays a declining role in the transportation system. Amtrak serves southern Iowa. Airline deregulation has altered air-service distribution. The main beneficiaries are Des Moines and Cedar Rapids-Iowa City.
Energy
Iowa energy policy in recent years has focused on the production of ethanol as an additive to gasoline to reduce the amount of petroleum consumed. The results have been modest. Iowa electricity is generated by a variety of sources, including nuclear-power plants, natural gas, coal, and petroleum, as well as hydroelectric and wind sources.
GOVERNMENT AND POLITICS
Iowa has the traditional separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government. The governor and lieutenant governor are elected as a unit. Other elected officials include the treasurer, auditor, secretary of state, secretary of agriculture, and attorney general. All serve 4-year terms. In the legislature the 100 representatives serve 2-year terms and the 50 state senators 4-year terms. Judges are appointed by the governor but must later be elected by the people for retention. Supreme Court judges serve 8-year terms, and appellate and trial court judges serve 6-year terms. Once a solidly Republican state, Iowa has in the last 30 years completed the transition to a competitive two-party state.
Iowa is distinguished by its electoral districting law, which removes the process of drawing electoral districts from the hands of politicians. Unlike in other states, a nonpartisan government bureaucracy determines the districts.
HISTORY
Paleo-Indians occupied what is now Iowa as long as 13,000 years ago, as soon as glacial ice retreated. These early people were hunters. Substantial archaeological evidence shows significant waves of Indian culture through Iowa and the surrounding areas of North America. The Woodland culture dominated from 500 BC to AD 800, with the Adena in the early part followed by the Hopewell. The Woodland peoples had small villages and practiced a primitive agriculture. They were succeeded by the Mississippian culture with the Oneonta tribe resident in Iowa. These people left the effigy mounds along the Mississippi. At the time of European contact, the Illinois, a northeast tribe, occupied extreme southeastern Iowa. Three Great Plains tribes--the Iowa, Santee, and Yankton--controlled the rest.
European Settlement
Although Louis Jolliet and Jacques Marquette traveled down the Mississippi River in 1673, significant European contact with Iowa came much later. Julien Dubuque, who mined lead along the Mississippi, established a permanent base in 1788. The land that was to become Iowa became part of the United States with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, and the following year the Lewis and Clark Expedition traveled up the Missouri River. The Sauk and Fox (Mesquakie) tribes, forced into the Mississippi River valley from Wisconsin and Illinois by the oncoming pressure of white settlement, defeated the Iowa Indians and occupied their lands in the late 18th and early-19th centuries. Following the Black Hawk War of 1832, the resistance of these tribes to white settlers was broken, and the land was opened to pioneer settlement. The first legal settlement west of the Mississippi took place in 1833. Successive purchases from the Indians led to settlement throughout the area of the state in the 1830s and '40s--but not without confrontations, the last being the Spirit Lake Massacre of 1857. Just before this event (in 1856) the Mesquakies, who had been forced to move to Kansas, convinced the Iowa legislature to permit their repurchase of land along the Iowa River near Tama. The Mesquakie Settlement now covers about 13 sq km (5 sq mi).
Statehood and Settlement
Iowa gained territorial status in 1838 with its capital in Iowa City. Statehood came in 1846 with the boundaries extended west to the Missouri. The population was little more than 100,000, but the U.S. Congress needed a free state to admit in conjunction with a new slave state, Florida. The capital was moved to the more central location of Des Moines in 1857.
Early white settlement in Iowa mainly came from other states, especially Ohio and New York. The early settlers were involved in agriculture and commerce, and from the beginning Iowa was linked commercially with the rest of the nation. Significantly, many of these early settlers, having already made previous moves, later moved westward again. The population grew rapidly, to 192,000 by 1850 and 675,000 by 1860, then to 1,194,000 by 1870.
The location of railroads quickly became an important political (and commercial) issue. Connections to the growing rail network became a requirement for the success of towns. River locations also were highly advantageous, as evidenced by the fact that all towns that became economically successful were both along rivers and attracted a rail line. Some rivers were important sources of energy, as connoted by the names of such towns as Cedar Rapids, Cedar Falls, and Iowa Falls.
The Civil War and Postwar Periods
The slavery issue and the American Civil War had a significant impact on Iowa, although the state suffered no actual fighting on its soil. At first a bastion of the Democratic party, Iowa swung strongly to the Republican party after its formation in Iowa in 1856. Iowans participated in the underground railway that helped runaway slaves escape to Canada. Almost 80,000 Iowans fought in the Civil War, a larger portion of Iowa's population than that of any other Union state. After the war, suffrage was extended to blacks, and schools were integrated.
The years after the Civil War brought the completion of the settlement of Iowa and continued growth of the transportation network. The state achieved a fairly well distributed rural population, with the overwhelming majority farming their own land. Iowa farming was commercial rather than subsistence, and a number of problems beset farmers. Floods, droughts, and pests plagued production, and economic depressions plagued their markets. Price gouging by railroads and distrust of banks and politicians led to the formation of agrarian movements, such as the Granger movement. The development of the "Corn Belt" in the late 19th century illustrates the commodity compartmentalization of agriculture in the Midwest. By 1880 much of Iowa had adopted a corn-hog agricultural production pattern. Feed corn, fed on the site to a farmer's own hogs, became the prime crop. The farmer then transported the hogs to the great slaughtering houses that developed in the major urban markets.
As the United States changed from an agricultural to an industrial country in the half century from 1870 to 1920, Iowa played a vital role in feeding the nation. Eastern Iowa became part of the manufacturing belt, particularly with the production of tractors and other farm equipment. Innovation, especially hybridization of corn and mechanization, paved the way for more efficient and productive farming.
The internal-combustion engine and electricity transformed life in Iowa, effectively reducing distances, increasing work capacities, and reorienting the scale of people's daily activities. Farmers were no longer isolated, and their lives increasingly became focused on the larger towns.
The Recent Period
Through much of the 20th century Iowa agriculture has had the seemingly paradoxical position of always having marginal farmers in jeopardy while the top farmers do well. In general, Iowa's people seemed to be immune to major economic ebbs and flows, neither rising too high nor falling too low. The 1980s changed this pattern, however, as reduced commodity prices and high inflation jolted Iowa out of its complacency. Iowa's economy suffered more than the national norm in recessions of the late 1970s and early 1980s but failed to share proportionately in the economic expansion of the later 1980s. Belatedly the state has moved to diversify. Efforts to form high-tech havens in the Iowa City-Cedar Rapids and Des Moines-Ames areas have met with marginal success, but efforts to streamline the meat-packing industry have cost well-paying jobs. Recently, the state has moved toward legalized gambling.
Adversely affecting the economy in 1993 was major flooding of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, with millions of dollars of damage sustained in Des Moines, Iowa City, Cedar Rapids, and Davenport.
Neil E. Salisbury and Rex Honey
Bibliography: Encyclopedia of the United States Series, Encyclopedia of Iowa (1993); Federal Writers' Project, Iowa (1938; repr. 1973); Hake, H. V., Iowa Inside Out (1968; repr. 1987); Mills, G. S., Rogues and Heroes from Iowa's Amazing Past (1972); Nelson, H. L., A Geography of Iowa (1976); Ostler, J., Prairie Populism (1993); Prior, J. C., Landforms in Iowa (1991); Sage, Leland L., A History of Iowa (1974; repr. 1987); Sayre, Robert F., ed., Take This Exit: Rediscovering the Iowa Landscape (1989); Schmidt, S. W., and Osbun, L. A., eds., Issues in Iowa Politics (1990); Schwieder, Dorothy, et al., Iowa, Past to Present, 2d rev. ed. (1991); Talbot, Ross B., Iowa in the World Economy (1985).
(c) 1996 Grolier, Inc.