Three Faces of Iowa

I can’t give you one good reason to visit northeastern Iowa. Instead, I can name at least a dozen reasons that, taken together, make it an ideal choice for a weekend getaway. There’s the “Smallest Church in the World” in Festina and the Little Brown Church in the Vale in Nashua, as well as trails for biking, hiking, and skiing, and Pulpit Rock Campground and numerous other tranquil camping sites. Gardeners and environmentalists will enjoy the Seed Savers Exchange Heritage Farm, which preserves heirloom fruit and vegetable seeds.

During a solitary sojourn in June, I bounced between Decorah and Spillville, which are 150 miles south of the Twin Cities and thirteen miles apart, and found enough diversions and scenery to keep me happily occupied for a long weekend. Later, my children and I ventured farther south to Dubuque, a historic river town that has evolved into an all-seasons haven for families.

The journey is as important as the destination. Highway 52 south of Rochester becomes a scenic two-lane road that winds through bluff country and charming small towns that often feature Amish horse-pulled buggies clopping along the road. You’ll begin to slow down too. Here are three stops you shouldn’t miss.

Ethnicity and the Arts
Decorah bills itself as “A place to get away, without the stress of a typical vacation or trip.”

JCPenney sits alongside painted murals, handcrafted-furniture stores, the Day Spring Spa, contemporary clothing stores, and a greater variety of restaurants than you might expect in an Iowa town. The Northeast Iowa Artists’ Studio Tour, September 30 through October 2 this year, offers self-guided tours of jewelry, potting, painting, and photography studios, where artists sell and demonstrate their work (800-463-4692).

Noticing, perhaps, that I was alone, a local woman recommended Hart’s Tea & Tarts, with a comfortably elegant atmosphere and menu of salads and croissant sandwiches that attracts women in droves (563-382-3795). As I fingered the heavy silverware and admired the “Grandma’s house” touches—tongs for the sugar cubes, flower-patterned china, linen napkins in rings—I eavesdropped on a table of fiftysomething women ordering decadent desserts and comparing notes about hot flashes. The one man in the room paid studious attention to his chicken salad.

Decorah is a town with strong Norwegian roots, impressively showcased at the Vesterheim Norwegian-American Museum in sixteen buildings that encompass a square block (563-382-9681). In back of the four-story museum are buildings transported from Norway or other parts of the Midwest—a century-old church, an 1879 schoolhouse, and cramped family quarters—that give visitors a realistic feeling of the immigrant experience and the hardships endured.

The you-are-there history is even more compelling in the museum itself. On display is a small ship that carried fifty-five passengers seeking to escape the overpopulation and rigid class system of late-nineteenth-century Norway. Upstairs, the story of making a home in America is told and colorful, extensive exhibits are devoted to quilts, hand-carved furniture, hand-painted dishes, and other arts and crafts.

Serenity in Spillville
“God, the sky is blue, and the air is shot with gold,” Patricia Hampl wrote in Spillville, her 1987 homage to the simple, rugged beauty of northeastern Iowa and the artistic heritage of Spillville.

Hampl wrote about the New York–to–Iowa pilgrimage of Czech musician and composer Anton Dvorák, who spent three months in Spillville in 1893, perhaps putting the finishing touches on his now-famous “New World” symphony. That summer remains enshrined in a memorial in Riverside Park, where Dvorák was said to take his morning walk along the Turkey River and where a dilapidated ballroom (“dance and stay young”) still hosts bands such as Jack Norton and the Mullet River Boys.

A two-room exhibit commemorates the place where Dvorák and his wife and six children lived in Spillville, and a poster is still on display downtown for a celebration held in 1993 to honor the hundredth anniversary of his visit. Phyllis Mashek, a lifelong area resident, conducts tours of St. Wenceslaus Church, built in 1860, pointing out the pipe organ Dvorák liked to play. St. Wenceslaus, the oldest surviving Czech Catholic church in the United States, is known for the iron crosses that mark sunken graves on the church’s back lawn.

Spillville holds stubbornly to the deep roots and slower pace of days gone by. An employee of the upscale Old World Inn complained to me that there’s nothing to do, “unless you like to hunt or skin deer.” After spending a night at the refurbished inn—where the dining and accommodations rival anything I’ve experienced in Stillwater or Red Wing—I was convinced that such boredom is worth pursuing. My room had no Internet access. My cell phone wouldn’t work. I spent the evening strolling, reading, and eating a delicious meal (specialties include pan-seared salmon and pork loin with sauerkraut) and slept as soundly that night as I have in a good long while.

The town’s proudest attractions are the 1854 Bouska Schoolhouse-Log Cabin, which sits on the grounds of the Bily Clocks Museum, a place better witnessed than described (563-562-3569). Had I not met a couple from Owatonna who had driven here solely to see the hand-carved clocks, I’d have been tempted to skip it. Instead, I spent an hour with museum director Georgiann Eckheart, a generous, informative tour guide whose husband teaches art at Luther College in Decorah. Donning white gloves, she showed me the clocks and described Czech bachelor farmers Joseph and Frank Bily, who pursued carving as an avocation. Lacking any training in art or sculpture, the brothers nevertheless produced astonishingly intricate clocks—some taller than they were. Each tells a unique story: about American pioneers, aviator Charles Lindbergh, the struggle for time as man-made innovations increased the speed of life . . . .

Georgiann recommended Taylor Made Bed & Breakfast, a neat Victorian house where proprietor Clarabelle Taylor insisted that I join her for coffee and kolacky in her spacious kitchen (she sells prune, apricot-cherry, and poppy seed varieties to anyone who knocks on the back door). Less expensive and more informal than the Old World Inn, Taylor Made is ideal for those who want an authentic Czech experience in Spillville. Taylor—who raised eleven children and considers this venture her “retirement”—cooks up homemade sausage and buttery kolacky every morning for breakfast. Her husband, Howard, still speaks Czech.

Modern-day attractions give credence to Dubuque’s boast that it’s a “Masterpiece on the Mississippi.” From the Dubuque Greyhound Park & Casino to the Park Farm Winery in nearby Bankston to the Tabor Home Vineyards and Winery in nearby Baldwin, the city offers perhaps the most diverse attractions in Iowa.

But the less flashy attractions honoring Dubuque’s roots, which date back to the 1780s, are worth visiting too. For dramatic scenery, don’t miss the Julien Dubuque Monument high atop the city. It’s part of the Mines of Spain—the area’s original moniker—State Recreation Area. The Fenelon Place Elevator, “the world’s shortest, steepest railway,” recalls an era when the city shut down for ninety minutes every day at noon so workers could go home for dinner. A former mayor lived on top of the bluff, and it took him so long to get home by carriage, he built a cable car straight up the steep hill. The attraction, which has endured several fires over the decades, is open from April through November. From the hilltop, you can see three states; bicyclists also use the lift.

Don’t miss the National Mississippi River Museum & Aquarium or the Dubuque Museum of Art. The city also offers numerous galleries, a dinner theater, symphony orchestra, and Five Flags Theater. We started our visit with a strictly-for-tourists trolley tour—a narrated, one-hour ride through the city. Catch it at 4th and Bluff Streets downtown daily at 12:15 p.m.

Traveling without the children? Dubuque claims more bars per capita than any other city in the nation. I had the family in tow, so the Grand Harbor Resort and Waterpark was more our style (866-690-4006). The “25,000 square feet of wet fun” here didn’t rival anything my kids experienced in Wisconsin Dells, but it sufficed after a long day of sightseeing.