Iowa Facts

An artist in Iowa named Patrick Acton built a complete model of Hogwarts out of matchsticks.

Field of Dreams finished filming in 1988. The baseball diamond stretched across two Iowa farms, and both were supposed to go back to corn. Farmer Don Lansing left his half standing instead. His family had farmed that ground since 1906. He never charged a cent for admission or parking. By the film's 20th anniversary, about 65,000 strangers a year were coming to play catch. They still show up today.

Iowa farmers gave 36 breeding hogs to Japan after two typhoons wrecked the farms of Yamanashi in 1959. The Air Force flew the hogs over, and 35 survived the three-day trip. Within nine years, about 500,000 hogs in Japan traced back to them. When Iowa flooded in 1993, Yamanashi sent help back. Iowa and Yamanashi are still sister states.

Grant Wood saw a small white house in Eldon, Iowa, in 1930, sketched it that afternoon and never returned. In his studio he painted his sister and his dentist in front of it, pitchfork in hand, faces stern. That sketch became American Gothic. The house still stands in Eldon, and over 12,000 visitors a year stop at the visitor center next door to pose with the pitchfork just like the painting.

In 1971, a fellow farmer told Gary Vermeer he was quitting cattle because haying took too many hands. Vermeer set out to build a baler one person could run alone. The prototype took about six weeks. It rolled bales about 6 feet wide and 7 feet across. That helped pioneer the modern round baler. Vermeer still builds them in Pella, Iowa, and every summer farmers still roll them his way: one person, one tractor.

Kate Shelley was a teenager when an 1881 storm collapsed a trestle near her Iowa home. A passenger train with 200 people aboard was still coming. She crawled across a flooded railroad bridge on her hands and knees, lantern blown out. She reached the depot in time to stop the train. Railroads gave her a lifetime pass and a Tiffany medal. Today, Union Pacific trains still cross the bridge that bears her name.

At 73, Alvin Straight rode a 1966 John Deere mower 240 miles to his ailing brother in Wisconsin. Too blind for a license, he would not be driven. At about 5 mph, with breakdowns and a stop when his money ran out, it took six weeks. Twin Peaks director David Lynch made it a G-rated film, released by Disney. The mower still sits in his Iowa hometown.

A cornhusking contest was a race to strip corn by hand, timed to the minute. In 1935, one of those contests drew 110,000 people to a cornfield in Newtown, Indiana. Two aerial bombs marked its start and finish, eighty minutes apart. Elmer Carlson of Iowa husked about 41½ bushels of corn by hand and won. NBC broadcast the whole contest live on national radio. Farmers still compete for the same title every October.

Dale Schroeder worked as a carpenter at the same Iowa company for 67 years. He never married. He drove a rusty old Chevrolet. When he died in 2005, nobody could believe he had secretly saved $3 million. He left it all to send 33 complete strangers to college. They call themselves "Dale's kids."

Eighteen thousand soldiers stood on a parade ground at Camp Dodge, Iowa in 1918 and became the Statue of Liberty when two photographers shot them from an 80 foot tower. 12,000 men filled the flame of the torch alone, while the whole body and head took only 2,000. Many fainted in wool uniforms as the heat neared 105 degrees.