After leaving Independence, Nader and I headed south towards US-30. Our first stop after reconnecting with US-30 was an old-time gas station and cafe known as Youngville.
It is no longer a gas station, but sort of a living museum. During the summer months the cafe opens on Tuesdays for a couple of hours and serves food. This meal has been on my food adventure bucket list for a few years now, but I have yet to check it off. This might be the year. I currently have the PTO. I just need to find somebody else willing to take part of a Tuesday off to go eat a meal that is really more about having a historical experience than a culinary one.
Here are the pictures I took while snooping around Youngville:
I’m a big fan of metal lawn chairs. In case you didn’t know.
It was a Skelly gas station.
C-R-E-E-P-Y!
I don’t know if these are the original gas pumps, but it would be pretty cool if they are!
Youngville is a Tudor Revival style building.
It is located northeast corner of the junction of US-30 and US-218.
Youngville has an interesting origin story. The following is from the Wiki:
Youngville Cafe, also known as Youngville Station, is a historic building located northwest of Watkins, Iowa, United States. It was a one-stop roadside business that included a café, a Skelly gas station, and three cabins for travelers to stay in. The cabins have subsequently been removed. The building calls attention to increasing business opportunities for women.[2] The Tudor Revival building was built in 1931 by Joe Young on his pasture land for his widowed daughter Lizzie Wheeler to support her and her children. The main building also contained residential space where the family lived. It is located on U.S. Route 30, which at this point had been the Lincoln Highway. The café/station also served as a bus depot for the Greyhound and Jefferson bus lines.
When Wheeler retired to Cedar Rapids, she rented out the business to others to run. She returned to the café/station in 1967 after the lease ended, but it closed that year because it didn’t have enough parking and vehicles could no longer park along the highway.[2] The building was used as a residence into the 1980s, when it was abandoned. The Benton County Sesquicentennial Commission acquired it as a restoration project to celebrate Iowa’s 150th anniversary of statehood in 1996. It is now owned by the Youngville Highway History Association and open as a café on a limited basis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngville_Cafe
After leaving Youngville, we headed west on US-30 towards home. We made 2 stops. One in Tama and one in Colo to visit a couple of other Lincoln Highway relics. But that is a story for next Wednesday. Which will be the final collection of images from Birthday Road Trip last year.