200 Beautiful Facts About Lowa

200 Beautiful Facts About Lowa

Iowa has been listed as one of the safest states in which to live.
Strawberry Point is home to the world’s largest strawberry.
Crystal Lake is home to a statue of the world’s largest bullhead fish.
Born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, John Wayne was the son of a pharmacist and grew up to become one of Hollywood’s most popular movie stars.
Iowa is the only state name that starts with two vowels.
Iowa State University is the oldest land grant college in the U.S.A.
Iowa is a U.S. state located in the midwestern United States.
Iowa is the only state name that starts with two vowels.
The highest double track railroad bridge in the world, the Kate Shelley Bridge, is located at Boone.
The famous actor John Wayne was born in Winterset on May 26, 1907.
Iowa State University is the oldest land grant college in the U.S.A.
Decorah hosts Nordic Fest a three-day celebration of Decorah’s Scandinavian heritage.
The National Balloon Museum in Indianola chronicles more than 200 years of ballooning history.
A whopping 20 Olympic athletes have come from Iowa.
The state’s smallest city park is situated in the middle of the road in Hiteman.
Scranton is home to Iowa’s oldest water tower still in service.
Dubuque is the state’s oldest city.
Iowa's capital is Des Moines, which is also the state's largest city.
The state animal of Iowa, chosen in 1933, is the American goldfinch. It's also known as the wild canary.
Iowa's state flower is the wild rose, usually represented as the prairie rose.
Iowa's state tree is the oak, often shown as a burr oak.
Crystal Lake is home to a statue of the world’s largest bullhead fish.
Rathbun Dam and Reservoir is the largest body of water in the state.
Spirit Lake is the largest glacier-made lake in the state.
West Okoboji is the deepest natural lake in the state. Its depth is 136 feet.
Imes Bridge is the oldest of Madison County’s six bridges.
Iowa’s longest and highest bridge crosses Lake Red Rock.
Elk Horn in the largest Danish settlement in the United States.
At 16 miles, East Okoboji is the longest natural lake in the state.
Kalona is the largest Amish community west of the Mississippi River.
The state’s lowest elevation point (at 480 feet) is in Lee County.
The Holliwell Bridge is the longest bridge in Madison County.
Francis Drake was 66 years old at his inauguration and Iowa’s oldest governor.
Iowa’s oldest continually running theater is in Story City.
The Cedar Rapids Museum of Art houses the largest collection of Grant Wood artwork.
Fenlon Place Elevator in Dubuque is the world’s steepest and shortest railway.
Wright County has the highest percentage of grade-A topsoil in the nation.
Quaker Oats, in Cedar Rapids, is the largest cereal company in the world.
Iowa City is UNESCO's only designated City of Literature in the USA.
Clarion is the only county seat in the exact center of the county.
Dubuque is home to the only county courthouse with a gold dome.
Iowa’s only fire tower is situated in Yellow River State Forest.
Sabula is Iowa’s only town on an island.
When the American Indians first arrived in what is now Iowa more than 13,000 years ago they were hunters and gatherers living in a Pleistocene glacial landscape.
By the time European explorers and traders visited Iowa, American Indians were largely settled farmers with complex economic, social, and political systems.
The written history of Iowa begins with the proto-historic accounts of Native Americans by explorers such as Marquette and Joliet in the 1680s.
Iowa was admitted to the union as the 29th state on Dec. 28, 1846.
Iowa derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many Native American tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration.
The states’ official nickname is the Hawkeye State, a tribute to Chief Black Hawk, an Indian warrior and leader of the Sauk Indians.
The vertical tricolor of blue, white, and red, reflects Iowa’s heritage as part of the French Louisiana Territory.
Born Donnabelle Mullenger in Denison, Oscar Award-winning actress, Donna Reed, started her career at the young age of 16.
Born Marion Robert Morrison in Winterset, John Wayne was the son of a pharmacist and grew up to become one of Hollywood’s most popular movie stars.
Meredith Willson, who played with the famous John Philip Sousa and the New York Philharmonic before launching his career as a famous composer and lyricist, is a Mason City native.
Glenn Miller, noted trombonist and orchestra leader, was born in Clarinda located in Southwest Iowa.
The town of Fort Atkinson was the site of the only fort ever built by the U.S. government to protect one Indian tribe from another.
Campers and motor homes are manufactured in Winnebago County. They’re called Winnebago’s.
Iowa is the only state whose east and west borders are 100% formed by water.
Sheldon High School Summer Theatre, the only high school repertory in Iowa and one of just a few in the nation presents a different play for each week in June and July.
In 2017, Ripley's Believe It Or Not named Burlington's Snake Alley as #1 in its Odd Spots Across America for being "unbelievably crooked".
The Fenelon Place Elevator in Dubuque is the shortest and steepest railway in the world. It's only 296ft long but rises 189ft.
Small town Hiteman has a tiny city park tucked away in the middle of a road. It's just big enough to fit a bench, water pump and sign.
Despite being landlocked, Iowa has its very own miniature island city. It's called Sabula, and was created by a damming project in 1938.
People in Mahaska County keep on finding woolly mammoth bones. The prehistoric giants were once common in the area during the last Ice Age.
Herbert Hoover, a West Branch native, was the 31st president of the United States and the first one born west of the Mississippi.
Mamie Doud Eisenhower’s birthplace is located in Boone and includes a restored frame house, complete with summer kitchen and original furniture from the family.
Van Meter is the hometown of baseball’s Bob Feller, an Iowa farm boy who went on to greatness with the Cleveland Indians during the Golden Age of baseball.
Iowa name origin stories suggest it's named after the Ioway (or Iowa) people, its original Native American inhabitants.
Another name origin story is that Ioway means 'the sleepy ones', and was a joking nickname given to the Bah Kho-je by another Native American tribe.
In 1869, Arabella Mansfield became the United States' first female lawyer, thanks to Iowa's Supreme Court ruling that women should be allowed to practice law.
Iowa had the highest percentage of its male population of any state serve in the Civil War. Out of a population of just 600,000 people, over 76,000 signed up.
After the Sioux City Elevated Railway was converted from steam to electric power in 1892, it became the first electric elevated railway in the world.
Ever since 1972, Iowa has always held the first caucus in all the presidential elections, right up to the most recent one in 2020.
Ripley’s Believe It or Not has dubbed Burlington’s Snake Alley the most crooked street in the world.
Strawberry Point is the home of the world’s largest strawberry.
The Saint Francis Xavier Basilica in Dyersville is the only basilica in the United States situated outside a major metropolitan area.
Cornell College is the only school in the nation to have its entire campus listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Sergeant Floyd Monument in Sioux City honors the only man to die during the Lewis and Clark expedition.
Iowa covers 56,273 square miles, and has a population of just over 3 million people.
Iowa is a Midwestern state which has borders with Minnesota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Missouri, Illinois and Wisconsin.
The Iowa state bird and flower, as well as the state tree, were chosen as Iowa's state symbols because they're common in the area and help support a wide variety of wildlife.
Iowa's state motto is "Our liberties we prize and our rights we maintain." The Iowa motto is a reference to its fight to be recognized as a state in its own right instead of a colony of Wisconsin.
Iowa has 99 counties. One of them is named Madison - yes, the one with the bridges. There are six.
The postal code for Iowa state, IA, uses the first and last letters instead of the first two, so it doesn't get mistaken for a number 10.
With the Mississippi River on its east and the Missouri on its west, Iowa is the only state bordered by two parallel rivers.
Iowa is about 92% farmland, but it still has more people living in urban areas than rural ones.
The highest point in Iowa is Hawkeye Point, at 1670 feet, while its lowest point is the Mississippi River at 480 feet.
Iowa has three geological areas. The Young Drift Plains are flat and make excellent farmland, the Driftless Area is mostly pines forest and cliff faces, and the Dissected Till Plains, where rivers have cut into the soil to create ridges.
Iowa is home to lots of wildlife. Among the most common animals are red foxes, least weasels, thirteen-lined ground squirrels and white-tailed deer.
Iowa's most common birds are grasshopper sparrows, cerulean warblers and scarlet tanagers as well as the American goldfinch.
Iowa is home to reptiles including western hognose snakes, Great Plains skinks and yellow mud turtles, and amphibians like Great Plains toads, blue-spotted salamanders and mudpuppies.
Although it has a national monument and a national park museum (the Herbert Hoover National Historic Site), Iowa still has no official National Park. The closest is Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota.
Effigy Mounds National Monument's prehistoric mounds are considered sacred by Native Americans. They're made of earth and shaped like animals including bears, birds, panthers, bison and deer.
Preparation Canyon State Park gets its name from a Mormon ghost town. When their leader demanded they give him everything they owned to show their devotion to God, the townspeople abandoned the town.
The first people to inhabit Iowa came there as long as 12,000 years ago.
Before European settlers arrived, the state was home to the Ioway, Missouria, Otoe, Illini and Dakota Sioux tribes.
In 1673, French explorers arrived in Iowa. They claimed it as French in 1682. For the next hundred years, Spain and France fought over the rights to the land, calling it French Louisiana or Spanish Louisiana.
Iowa was admitted to the USA as part of the Louisiana Purchase on 18 December 1846, making it the 29th state to join the Union.
The butterfly stroke in swimming was invented by a swim coach at the University of Iowa.
A professor at Iowa State University and his grad student assistant created the first electronic digital computer. It wasn't much like today's laptops though - it weighed over 750 pounds.
Iowan Otto Rohwedder invented pre-sliced bread in 1912. Sadly, his invention was toast shortly afterwards. His workshop set on fire, destroying the slicing machine.
There are about 25 million hogs and pigs on Iowa's farms - more than eight times the state's human population.
Iowa, known for its corn, produces about 2.4 billion bushels of the stuff every year. That's the most out of any state in America, and more than some whole countries.
Iowan company Quaker Oats is the biggest cereal company anywhere in the world.
Iowa's nickname 'the Hawkeye State' comes either from the name of a character in the novel 'Last of the Mohicans' or is a tribute to real-life tribal leader, Chief Black Hawk.
As well as its Hawkeye State nickname, Iowa is often also called the Corn State.
Sioux City may be only the fourth largest city in Iowa, but its metropolitan area covers bits of three states: Iowa, Nebraska and South Dakota.
The house in the famous Grant Wood painting 'American Gothic' is a real house in Eldon. It's still standing today.
Des Moines gymnastics coach Liang Chow has successfully trained two Olympic gold medalists in the sport.
Every year, thousands of people take part in a 7-day bike ride across the state. It's called the Register Annual Great Race Across Iowa.
Iowa has the largest literacy rate in the whole USA. 99% of Iowans can read and write.
Britt in Iowa is home to the National Hobo Convention, celebrating the days when hobos rode the rails.
Elk Horn west of Des Moines is the largest Danish settlement in the USA. It's even got a Danish museum.
Way back in prehistoric times, 17-foot tall, 5-ton giant sloths used to roam the state's plains.
The Corn State is the only state whose name starts with two vowels.
The Grotto of the Redemption in West Bend is the most complete artificial collection of minerals, fossil and shells in the world.
Iowa has more than 67 million chickens - larger than the population of the UK! They lay almost 15 billion eggs a year, an egg-straordinary number.
Strawberry Point is home to a 15-foot tall fiberglass strawberry. It's the largest in the world.
Iowa is also home to the World's Largest Wooden Nickel and the World's Largest Ball of Popcorn.
The state has the world's largest truck stop. At four times the usual size, it's even got its own dentist's office.
Not only does Iowa have a town called Peru, the town is the birthplace of the Red Delicious apple.
President Herbert Hoover was born in Iowa. His childhood home is now a national museum.
Television host Johnny Carson is another native Iowan. He was born in the state's southwest and lived there until he was eight.
Famous showman William "Buffalo Bill" Cody is from Scott County, where his boyhood home has been preserved as a visitor attraction.
Mildred Wirt Benson, better known as one of Nancy Drew authors Carolyn Keene, was born in Iowa.
Actor and producer (and restaurant owner) Ashton Kutcher is originally from Cedar Rapids.
Actor Elijah Wood is another Cedar Rapids native, although he moved away to pursue his Hollywood career at a young age.
Olympic bobsledder and hurdler Lolo Jones calls Des Moines her hometown. She's one of the rare athletes to compete in both the winter and summer Olympics.
Youtube's gymnastic and cheerleading enthusiasts Megan and Ciera Stitz are from Iowa and attended Iowa State University.
Western movie legend John Wayne was born in Iowa, where he wrote for a student newspaper.
A fictional one, but we still think it counts. Captain Kirk of Star Trek fame is due to be born in Riverside, Iowa in 2228.
Maynard Reece is the only artist to win the Federal Duck Stamp competition five times.
A bronze life-sized sculpture of a Norwegian immigrant family (circa 1860) is located on a six acre restored prairie site located at the east entry to Lake Mills on Highway 105.
Iowa’s only operating antique carousel is located in the city of Story City.
Knoxville’s National Sprint Car Hall of Fame and Museum is the only museum in the country dedicated to preserving the history of sprint car racing.
It is bordered by Wisconsin to the northeast, Illinois to the east, Missouri to the south, Nebraska to the west, South Dakota to the northwest, and Minnesota to the north.
As of April 2018, the population of Indiana was estimated to be 3,160,553. It is the 30th most populous state in the United States.
Indiana is the 26th largest state in the United States in terms of total area with 145,746 square kilometers (145,746 square miles).
Des Moines is the capital and most populous city of Iowa. It is on and named after the Des Moines River, which likely was adapted from the French colonial name, Rivière des Moines, meaning “River of the Monks.”
Iowa is bordered by the Mississippi River on the east; the Missouri River and the Big Sioux River on the west.
Most of Iowa’s landscape is gently rolling hills or flat plains. The state’s elevation generally increases from east-southeast to west-northwest.
The state’s lowest elevation point at 146 meters (480 feet) above sea level is in Lee County.
Hawkeye Point is the highest natural point in Iowa at 510 meters (1,670 feet) above sea level.
Iowa’s natural vegetation is tall grass prairie and savanna in upland areas, with dense forest and wetlands in flood plains and protected river valleys, and pothole wetlands in northern prairie areas.
Maquoketa Caves State Park is a state park located in Iowa. The park contains more caves than any other state park in Iowa. In 1991 45 hectares (111 acres) on the east side of the park was listed as a historic district on the National Register of Historic Places.
The Field of Dreams is a baseball field and pop-culture tourist attraction built originally for the movie of the same name. The studio built the baseball diamond on two farms, a few miles outside Dyersville. When production completed, the baseball diamond created for the movie was left behind. Most of the baseball field, including the diamond and the adjacent house, was on one farm owned by the Lansing family, but the left and center field were on an adjacent property owned by the Ameskamp family. The field was built on the two properties because the producers wanted the field in a location where sunset shots would be uninhibited.
The Shrine of the Grotto of the Redemption is a religious shrine located in West Bend, Iowa, in the Roman Catholic Diocese of Sioux City. A conglomeration of nine grottos depicting scenes in the life of Jesus, the Grotto contains a large collection of minerals and petrifications and is believed to be the largest grotto in the world. t is also “considered to be the world’s most complete man-made collection of minerals, fossils, shells, and petrifications in one place.”
The bridges of Madison County is a scenic site which inspired countless photographs, numerous visits, and even a best-selling novel turned movie. Before The Bridges of Madison County became a blockbuster, the bridges were simply a part of life for people living in this area in the late 19th century. Today, six of the original nineteen covered bridges that once stood here remain, five of which are on the National Historic Register and all of which attract national attention throughout the year.
The Iowa State Capitol, seat of the Iowa General Assembly, is located in Iowa’s capital city, Des Moines. The building was constructed between 1871 and 1886, and is the only five-domed capitol in the country. Located at East 9th Street and Grand Avenue, the Capitol is set atop a hill and offers a panoramic view of the city’s downtown and the West Capitol Terrace. Various monuments and memorials are to its sides and front, including the Soldiers and Sailors’ Monument and the Lincoln and Tad statue.

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