4 thoughts on “Town Sign Project: Marshall County”

1. Sleeper here – I actually really like the whole retro vibe the Marshalltown one has. I mean, my living room area is definitely retro, so it meets my particular interests, but I didn’t expect them to have a fun sign. I expected it to be bricks.

   I’ve never heard of the Green Mountain train wreck – that’s sad, but fascinating. I wish that “Iowa history” classes in fourth and fifth grade went more into stuff like this.

2. Marshalltown does have a better sign than I expected or remembered. I would say they have the best sign for towns over the size of 20,000, so far. And it isn’t that close.

   SPOILER: Next week there will be a new #1 in the Power Rankings.

   I’m sad I haven’t heard from Shannon yet on whether or not she was able to predict the Marshall County winner, but I really think this one was super easy to pick.

   It is one of those things, like the Titanic, where you just have to wonder what they were thinking.

   “Hey lets put wood train cars, filled with mostly women and children, between steel cars. What is the worst that could happen?”

   I kind of stumbled upon that while aimlessly clicking through Wikipedia pages. I’d like to find a website with a definitive list of Historical Markers. But I haven’t really found that.

   The Iowa Historical Society has one, but it is less than comprehensive and the website looks like it was designed in 1996.

3. It’s for sure the best of the “big” towns you’ve posted. I dig a good 60s/70s vibe. I think the interior of High Life Lounge is delightful, even though I’ve only been in there twice and don’t want to really sit on anything. (Mostly because bars are largely disgusting.) I can’t wait to see the new #1 – I have high hopes for the sign from Mount Carmel. Because there’s so much opportunity there.

   I knew straight out of the gate which would be your favorite for Marshall County – I bet Shannon calls it! It was a solid county, though, so I bet ranking the other slots was not easy.

   Yeah, the only thing worse you could have done is filled those wood cars with explosives and fireplaces in addition to the children and women. It really was pretty foreseeable.

   I hope that your blog becomes sort of an Iowa history site eventually – the postcard recreation, the town signs, all of it would be really interesting for the Iowa Historical Society. I’m not exactly shocked that their website is archaic – we love walking the kids through the State Historical Building, but it’s not like they’re changing things up a lot there each time. The Ames Historical Society’s page is better than you would expect – a friend encouraged me to send some COVID photos I took in March to them, so I did. Not sure that they’ll actually do anything with them, but they said they were adding them to the archives.

4. You mean Mount Carmel in Carroll County? I do have a sign picture from there, but technically it isn’t a town. In fact, it isn’t even really an unincorporated town or a census designated place. I don’t even know what it is. It is almost like it doesn’t exist, only I’ve been there.

   But the sign should read, “Welcome to Mt. Carmel, but not that Mount Carmel”. Then the picture should be of the Branch Davidians compound on fire. Just spitballing here.

   Shannon still hasn’t called it. So very sad. So very, very sad.

   Yeah, that reminds me that I need to get on joining the Boone County Historical Society now that their reputation has been returned.

   I know the Ames Historical Society as a pretty incredible photo archive. I don’t know that Boone has anything like that. It definitely isn’t online, like the Falwell Brown Collection or whomever is. Or at least I remember it being. Grinnell, the college, seems to have a real good historical photograph archive.

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