Des Moines Register

10-07-07

Doak: Iowa's land could beckon again

Pretty countryside, small-town life might attract another migration.

Richard Doak

In Iowa, it has always been about the land.

The land drew people to Iowa in the beginning. Today, as Iowa faces a need to attract a new tide of newcomers, perhaps the land can be a lure again.

The attraction of the land has always been powerful, perhaps more powerful than we realize. Look at our history.

Americans have always been captivated by the image of covered wagons headed west. The saga of the Oregon Trail is imbedded in our psyche.

But here's something you might not know. The migration over the Oregon Trail was a relative trickle compared to the flood of immigrants coming to Iowa in roughly the same years.

The best estimate of the number of people who traveled the Oregon Trail is about 345,000. During the same period, Iowa's population grew by 1.1 million.

So, for every one person who chose to migrate over the Oregon Trail, three chose to come to Iowa.

They might have been the smart ones. Perhaps they knew that true wealth lay in the rich soil of Iowa, not in the glitter of gold dust in California.

Pioneer Iowa newspaper editors were amazed by the influx.

The Dubuque Reporter declared in 1854, "Day by day the endless procession moves on - a mighty army of invasion."

We all know what caused that invasion - the land.

People came to farm the land, to mine the coal beneath it or to offer goods and services to those who did. One way or another, the land drew them all.

The migration to Iowa continued until about 1900, by which time the land had essentially all been taken.

That era, around the turn of the last century, was a sort of golden age for Iowa. It's when Iowa's essential character as a state was shaped, and a lot of it had to do with the pattern of settlement.

Because virtually all of the land in Iowa is tillable, farms are everywhere in the state, not just in a few locations. The population of Iowa was widely dispersed and fairly evenly spread across the entire state.

Towns sprang up everywhere too - but not big ones. Iowa developed no equivalent to Chicago or Kansas City. Iowa has nearly a thousand towns, but only a handful rose to the level of moderate-sized city. Iowa was a state of farms and small towns, a demographic fact that very much shaped our character.

When you think of Iowa, you think of picturesque farmsteads and small-town hospitality. That's what Iowa is all about.

A century-long slide

If you wanted to construct an ideal Iowa, look to the decades around 1900 as the model. The small-town main streets were alive on Saturday nights. Rural neighborhoods had active social lives centered on churches, Grange halls and country schools.

It couldn't last. We all know what happened.

The population of most Iowa counties peaked around 1900 and has been slowly declining ever since.

The tractor and other machines not only changed farming, but also changed Iowa profoundly. Once it became possible for one person to cultivate 1,000 acres, everything changed.

Wal-Mart is often accused of killing off small-town main streets, and we complain about the evil forces of consolidation closing rural schools.

The truth is, if Wal-Mart didn't exist, the stores on Main Street would still be closing because there simply aren't enough people in the surrounding countryside to support them.

We could have chosen to keep open all the old country schools, but, if we had, they'd sit empty now simply because there are no kids to attend them.

Redefining 'the land'

The countryside and small towns in Iowa have been slowly depopulating for a hundred years. The trend continues today.

Perhaps that is Iowa's destiny. Perhaps Iowa is evolving into a state of a few prosperous metro areas and a collection of county-seat towns basically just holding their own, all surrounded by little ghost towns and an essentially empty countryside.

That might not be such a bad place: Iowa, a state of livable cities surrounded by open space.

Most of us, however, would probably prefer a different vision. We would like to see Iowa's cities grow and prosper, but we'd also like to see families return to the countryside. We'd like to see rural neighborhoods, country churches and 4-H Clubs come alive again. We'd like to see small towns stop fading away.

Rural and small-town life is at the core of what makes Iowa special.

The question is: How do we revive it? I have a simple proposition. It's this: Hundreds of thousands of people once were drawn to Iowa by the land. Why can't the land draw people to Iowa once again?

I think it can - but we need to broaden our thinking about what constitutes "the land."

Clean water, amenities

The land isn't just soil to be farmed.

Part of Iowa's problem is that we have tended to think of the land in just one dimension, as good only for conventional farming. But the land is so much more than that. The land is the Earth and everything on it.

The land most certainly includes the water. While much of the world faces water shortages and conflict over water, Iowa is blessed with just the right amount. We have tens of thousands of miles of rivers and streams that could draw people for canoeing, for fishing or just for the joy of living near clean-flowing water - except we haven't kept our rivers clean.

Clean the water, and they will come, because few other places in the world can match Iowa's water resources.

If the water is part of the land, so are the towns. Some are nestled in the valleys, some are perched on the ridges, but they all sprang from the land.

Those who study economic development are intrigued by Richard Florida's concept of the "creative class" - the notion that growth occurs in places where creative professionals choose to live. The urban scene with loft apartments and coffeehouses is usually thought of as the natural habitat of the creative class, but recent thinking has suggested that rural communities with lots of natural amenities might appeal to creative workers just as much if not more than the urban scene.

The key is the word "amenities." If we want our small towns to come back, it is essential that they offer amenities both in town and in the surrounding countryside.

Beauty, niche farming

Speaking of countryside, the landscape is also part of the land. From the Loess Hills in the west to the Mississippi Bluffs in the east, and all the terrain in between, Iowa is a state of great beauty.

We have done little to enhance that beauty or to make it more accessible to people. We must change that if we want the land to again be a magnet for migration to Iowa.

Then there is the potential of specialty farming to bring people back to the land. The explosion of vineyards and wineries in Iowa is a remarkable development. Large-scale, row-crop agriculture will probably always dominate Iowa, but if we can find a few more enterprises like wine-making, where a family can make a living on 10 acres instead of 1,000, - if the land can support just a few more families per township - then the rural churches will have a few more people in the pews, the Main Streets will have a few more patrons, some schools might not have to close.

New rural entrepreneurs can also help form the critical mass that entices the creative class to town.

The land is good for a whole lot more than row crops. It can be what draws a whole second migration to Iowa.

RICHARD DOAK is a retired Register editor and columnist and a lecturer in journalism at Iowa State University.