IAIowa Fun Facts

Iowa is the only state with a river on both sides. The Mississippi runs the entire eastern border, and the Missouri and Big Sioux run the western one, so you cannot enter Iowa from east or west without crossing water. That accident of hydrology defined the state's shape before anyone drew the county lines.

Facts most people get wrong

• Iowa is not flat. The Loess Hills along the Missouri River are wind blown silt piled into ridges hundreds of feet deep, and deposits of that depth exist in only one other place on earth, along the Yellow River in China.
• Almost none of Iowa's corn is sweet corn. The crop is field corn, grown for livestock feed, ethanol and processed ingredients, and it is inedible straight off the cob.
• The Iowa caucus is not a primary election. It is a party run meeting where people gather in precinct rooms and physically group by candidate. Turnout is a small fraction of a general election.
• The line from Field of Dreams is "If you build it, he will come." The he is the ballplayer father, not a crowd, and the misquote has outlived the film.
• Des Moines is not French for of the monks. Traders wrote Riviere des Moines from a local name recorded as Moingona, and the monk reading was attached afterward.
• Grant Wood's American Gothic is not a New England scene. The house stands in Eldon, Iowa, and Wood painted it in 1930 after spotting the window from the road.

Records and firsts

• Iowa leads the nation in corn, in pork and in eggs, three separate first place rankings at once.
• Arabella Mansfield of Mount Pleasant became the first woman admitted to the bar in the United States in 1869.
• The Iowa Supreme Court struck down school segregation in 1868 in Clark v. Board of Directors, 86 years before Brown v. Board of Education reached the same conclusion nationally.
• The Iowa 80 truck stop at Walcott, open since 1964, is the largest truck stop in the world.
• RAGBRAI, first ridden across the state in 1973, is the oldest and largest bicycle touring event in the world.
• Iowa became the 29th state on December 28, 1846.

Geography that surprises

• Carter Lake is the only Iowa town west of the Missouri River. A flood in 1877 cut the river a new channel and stranded the place on the Nebraska side. The Supreme Court sorted out the boundary in 1892 and left the town in Iowa.
• Hawkeye Point, the highest spot in the state at 1,670 feet, sits in a former farmyard in Osceola County, marked with a silo, a picnic table and a sign.
• Iowa borders six states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, Missouri, Nebraska and South Dakota.
• Roughly 85 percent of Iowa's land is farmland, the highest share of any state, which is why less than one percent of the original tallgrass prairie is left standing.
• The northeast corner sits in the Driftless Area, which glaciers missed entirely, so it has limestone bluffs and cold water trout streams that look nothing like the rest of the state.

Where the name comes from

Iowa is named for the Ioway people, who call themselves Baxoje. The name reached English through French traders who wrote down a Dakota rendering of the word, and it attached first to the Iowa River, which was on French maps long before there was a territory.

The meaning is not settled. The tourist translation, the beautiful land, cannot be traced to any Native source and appears to come from nineteenth century promotional writing. Historians treat it as boosterism rather than etymology.

Quick stats

• Population: 1 to 5 million
• Area rank: #26 of 50
• Admitted: 1846
• Capital: Des Moines
• Largest city: Des Moines
• Time zone: Central
• Nickname: Hawkeye State
• State bird: American Goldfinch

Bordering states

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