COMMUNITY NEWS
| Muscatine County, Iowa COMMUNITY NEWS | |
Source: Des Moines Sunday Register, August 4, 2002
Submitted by Lynn McCleary, July 2, 2014Excerpt from Special Route 6 Report - Iowa’s forgotten highway
A busy corridor that linked the state from the Mississippi to the Missouri rivers, much of the once-celebrated road now winds through quietly fading towns.
WILTON
Some see dollars along the highwayJust as the opening of Interstate 80 siphoned business from Highway 6, P.D. “Bud” Ellis saw great possibilities in 1932 when the Grand Army of the Republic Highway opened three blocks north of his filling station.
Ellis had run a station on what was then called Highway 32, an east-west route through eastern Iowa.
When Highway 6 opened, Ellis sold his Highway 32 station and bought a house on the new federal road. He converted the front rooms to an office and peddled milk, bread and other food items to the neighborhood and travelers.
In addition to this precursor of today’s convenience stores, Ellis built a crude version of a motel. “It was just old cabins,” says his daughter, 76-year old Norma Johnson.
By the early 1930’s 2 million new cars a year were using America’s highways, and Uncle Sam responded with roads such as U.S. 6 and U.S. 30 – both major east-west arterials that crossed Iowa.
Tens of thousands of people like Bud Ellis saw the opportunity this auto-highway boom created. Gas stations, restaurants and motels popped up wherever construction crews were pouring concrete.
Townsfolk in Wilton, midway between Iowa City and Davenport, recall that within a few years of the road’s opening there were four or five new filling stations, four motels and several diners. The only stoplight in this town of 2,829 was along the highway, and on University of Iowa football game days it couldn’t keep up. “It was almost bumper-to bumper traffic,” says Donna Birkhofer, 75, the retired postmaster.
Karen Garrison, 60, was counting on heavy traffic when she set out boxes of tomatoes for sale in the front yard of her Highway 6 home. She soon built a one-stall garage at the edge of town so she could sell flowers and produce from a ‘country market’. “Now I have 13 greenhouses,” Garrison says.
Her store, which opened in the early 1960’s just before Interstate 80 was finished five miles to the north, now draws a local crowd but is busy enough to support six full-time works.
Local workers make up most of the guests at the 12 room-Motel Wilton, the last of the town’s lodgings. Still, owners Don and Lois Kiser say interstate travelers occasionally drift into town- enticed by rates around $35 a night. Local traffic also keeps Brammeier’s filling station going, mostly for repair work. The business open in 1949 and - to the amazement of some – still sells full-service gas. “We still go out and wash the windows”, says 45-year-old Doug Brammeier, who started pumping gas there when he was 14 and bought the business in 1980.
In another bow to the good old days, the station lets customers charge their fuel by the month.
No one along Highway 6 pretends that business is anywhere near its peak in the days before Interstate 80. But they’re happy to have the business they’ve got, and hope the services they provide will keep customers coming back, and staying in small towns that the interstate has left behind.
Written by S. P. Dinnen
About Highway 6 Birth of a Highway
1919: The first highway maps were issued, with the road from Davenport to Des Moines called Route 7.
1923: The Des Moines-to-Council Bluffs road, which had been Route 2, was changed to Route 7.
1924: Route 7 from Des Moines to Council Bluffs was changed back to Route 2.
1927: A standardized number system was adopted and the entire road across Iowa was labeled Highway 32.
1932: Highway 32 was renamed Highway 6.How Long is it?
In Iowa, the highway is 234,056 miles with 161,234 miles of asphalt, 70,036 miles of concrete and 2,7866 miles of composite materials.Highway 6 used to be the longest continuous east-west route in the United States, stretching from Cape Code Mass., to Long Beach, Calif. – or 3,715 miles. Now, it stops about 40 miles into California and is No. 2 in length to US Highway 20 by 116 miles.
National History
1926: U.S. 6 was laid out in two comparatively small parts; from Cape Cod to the Connecticut-New York state border and from Kingston, N.Y., to Erie, Pa.
1928: The two pieces were united.
Early 1930’s: The Roosevelt Highway Association lobbied for the extension of U.S. 6 westward. It subsumed U.S. 32 and 38 from Chicago to Denver, and continued along other routes to Long Beach, and gained the name Roosevelt Highway.
1936: The Grand Army of the Republic (an association of Union veterans of the Civil War) proposed that W.S. 6 be named the Grand Army of the Republic Highway. Individual states approved the designation, Iowa in 1947.
1964: California truncated Route 6 at U.S. 395 in Bishop, Calif., just over the Nevada state line.Interstate 80
The year before the final section of Interstate 80 opened in 1965, a total of 5,230 cars passed a point east of Grinnell on Highway 6 each day. After? The total dropped to 1,920.
A 1965 Des Moines Register article about effects of the interstate on Highway 6 towns quoted the owner of a Grinnell service station. The owner said gallon-per-month gas sales dropped from 130,000 to 20,000 after the interstate opened.Did You Know?
The town of Ladora was named after the notes on a musical scale – la, do and re.
The Wilton Candy Kitchen claims to be the oldest ice cream parlor/soda fountain in continuous operation in the United States.
Dexter is named for a famous racehorse.
The west’s first robbery of a moving train took place on July 21, 1873, on a curve of the railroad track west of Adair near the Turkey Creek Bridge on “U.S. No. 6 Highway.” The robbers? They were believed to be Jessie James and his gang.
Back to Muscatine Co. IAGenWeb, Index Page
Page created July 2, 2014