Iowa, United States — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Iowa known for?

Corn and soybeans run to the horizon across its rolling plains, and the state anchors the Corn Belt that helps feed much of the United States. The painter Grant Wood grew up among these barns and gable-roofed farmhouses and turned them into American Gothic. Des Moines, the capital, throws the Iowa State Fair each August, one of the largest gatherings of its kind in the country.

Every four years, its caucuses open the race for the White House.

Where is Iowa?

Iowa sits in the upper Midwest of the United States, a landlocked square of prairie between two great rivers. The Mississippi River draws its entire eastern edge; the Missouri River and the Big Sioux River draw the west. No other state is bracketed by rivers on both sides like this.

Six states ring it. Wisconsin and Illinois lie across the Mississippi River to the east, Missouri to the south, Nebraska and South Dakota to the west, and Minnesota along the northern line. The land between tilts gently, drained by rivers that run from the higher northwest toward the Mississippi in the southeast. The interior is not as flat as its reputation suggests.

In the far west, wind-piled silt has built the Loess Hills, a ridge of bluffs standing a couple of hundred feet above the Missouri River valley; only the loess near the Yellow River in China lies deeper. The northeast tells the opposite story. There the glaciers of the last ice age never reached, leaving the Driftless Area, a country of limestone bluffs, spring-fed creeks and wooded valleys that most of the Midwest lost to the flattening ice.

Between these two edges spreads the rolling farmland that made the state famous, dark-soiled and gridded into fields. Des Moines sits near the middle of it all.

What is Iowa like?

Iowa's identity is rooted in the land and the people who farm it. This is quiet, practical country. Agriculture sets the rhythm of the year, from spring planting to the autumn harvest, and it shows up in the food, the fairs and the talk.

The Iowa State Fair in Des Moines is the fullest expression of it, drawing a crowd from every county for prize hogs, butter sculptures and food served on a stick. Small-town life still matters here, and civic pride runs through the Fourth of July parades and the Friday-night football lights. For a farm state, Iowa carries an outsized cultural weight.

Grant Wood painted its gable-roofed farmhouses into American Gothic and led the Regionalist movement from a studio in Cedar Rapids. Iowa City, a UNESCO City of Literature, has trained generations of writers through the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the oldest graduate creative-writing program in the country. German communal settlers built the seven villages of the Amana Colonies, whose craft workshops and family-style restaurants still run.

Older still are the Meskwaki, who bought their land back in Tama County and never left. Faith, education and a plain-spoken civility shape the public character.

What is the history of Iowa?

The land belonged to the Meskwaki, Sauk and other nations long before it was surveyed into farms. American settlers pushed west across the Mississippi River after the Black Hawk War opened the territory to purchase. Iowa entered the Union as a free state in 1846, the twenty-ninth star on the flag and a northern vote in the long argument over slavery.

Railroads and steamboats then bound its river towns to Chicago and the wider country. Corn and hogs did the rest.

What is the climate of Iowa?

Iowa has a humid continental climate, with a wide swing between the seasons. Summers are hot and sticky, when moisture drawn up from the Gulf feeds towering thunderstorms and the tornadoes that give the state its share of spring and early-summer warnings. Winters bite.

Snow and hard freezes settle in from the northwest, colder there than in the milder southeast corner. Rain and snow together water the corn without the need for much irrigation. Autumn is the traveller's season, dry and gold over the harvested fields.

How do you get to Iowa?

Arrivals mostly come by air. Des Moines International Airport handles most arrivals, backed by the Eastern Iowa Airport in Cedar Rapids. On the ground the state is easy to cross: Interstate 80 runs its full width from east to west, and Interstate 35 cuts north to south, the two meeting at Des Moines.

Amtrak's California Zephyr threads the southern counties on its long run between Chicago and the Pacific coast. From the river cities, bridges step straight across the Mississippi River into Illinois and Wisconsin.