By Jerome Thompson

 

In 1919, Iowa and the world was recovering from World War I. Iowa troops were coming home. The Good Roads movement was pulling Iowa out of the mud. Most of Iowa’s roads were dirt or gravel at best and Iowa had a relatively new Highway Commission. Roads and highways were named, not numbered. You could travel the Lincoln Highway (U.S. Highway 30) or the National Parks Pike (U.S. Highway 18).

 

The parks movement in Iowa had its beginning at the turn of the century. Automobiles were becoming more affordable and people were looking to go places. As stated by Rebecca Conard in her 1997 book, “Places of Quiet Beauty,” “By 1920, automobile travel and parks were inextricably linked in the public’s imagination, and Iowa, like many other states, was in the midst of a highway frenzy.”

 

Edgar R. Harlan, director and curator of the Historical Department of Iowa and secretary to the Iowa Board of Conservation, posted a notice of a meeting of the Iowa Conservation Association to be held in McGregor on July 27-29, 1919. Members of the board and Historical Department staff would travel from Des Moines by automobile to tour proposed state park areas in central and northeast Iowa. The meeting in McGregor had two functions. First, delegations from Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin and Illinois wanted to develop a uniform method of making maps and guides to park areas for the new wave of motorist travel. Second, the meeting was to begin organizing a campaign by these states to have Congress establish an Upper Mississippi River National Park.

 

Sadie Rae Scott, a stenographer with the Historical Department, traveled to record the proceedings of the McGregor meeting. She made a personal record of the trip in a series of letters to her mother and a few photographs of her great adventure through the eyes of a 28 year-old single working woman. These letters are preserved in the Edgar Harlan Papers at the Cowles Library Special Collections at Drake University.

 

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