I'm Charity Nebbe.

And this is Greetings from Iowa.

Well, it may not seem like it at first.

Iowa is full of surprises when it comes to the homes, buildings and architecture.

For example, the last surviving hotel designed by the legendary architect Frank Lloyd Wright sits right here in Iowa.

The Capitol building with its gold covered dome is the largest gilded dome in the United States.

And there are countless homes with unique stories that are waiting to be uncovered.

On this episode, we'll take a tour of an architectural treasure in Mason City.

We'll learn how the Sears Roebuck catalog played an important role in home construction in the early 20th century.

And we'll explore the origin and history of a rivalry between two football teams that is tied to a pig from Fort Dodge.

All that and more coming up next on Greetings from Iowa.

Funding for Greetings from Iowa is provided by: With our Iowa roots and Midwestern values, Farmers Mutual Hail is committed to offering innovative farm insurance for America's farmers.

Just as we have for six generations.

Farmers Mutual Hail America's crop insurance company the Pella Roll Screen Foundation is a proud supporter of Iowa PBS.

Pella Windows and Doors strives to better our communities and build a better tomorrow.

[music] Iowa is sometimes called the land between two rivers because of the two largest waterways making up the east and west borders of our state.

Rivers, however, are a bit unpredictable as to which path they choose to follow.

And every once in a while, this can cause confusion among neighbors.

This is Iowa.

And this is Nebraska, and separating these two states is the Missouri River, a perfect natural boundary?

Everything on the eastern side is Iowa, and everything on the western side is Nebraska: simple, clear and easy to understand.

This, however, is Carter Lake, Iowa.

A piece of land that is a little over two square miles sitting snugly in Omaha, Nebraska.

As borders were drawn during the founding of Iowa, this small community wasn't an oversight or a mistake.

On the contrary, Carter Lake has a colorful, confusing history that involves floods, legal battles and secession.

The Missouri River is no stranger to periodic flooding as the waters rise, they sometimes slightly alter the course of the river following a new or different channel.

In 1877, a major flood occurred during an ice jam along what was then called Saratoga Bend between Council Bluffs and Omaha.

The flood caused the Missouri River to change course, and when the waters receded, a crescent shaped body of water called a cut off lake was all that remained of the river's previous channel.

Immediately after the flood, a legal battle broke out between Nebraska and Iowa.

Nebraska claimed the cut off lake and the surrounding area as its land since it sat on the Omaha side of the river.

Iowa disagreed.

Soon after the formation of the lake, the site became a flourishing recreational area.

The destination was popular for boating, fishing, picnics and swimming.

Later, developers would build an amusement park with a merry go round and one of the earliest roller coasters in the Midwest.

Council Bluffs officials, however, saw Omaha's intrusion as a bold attempt to steal land that rightfully belonged to them.

The ensuing legal battle over whether Iowa or Nebraska had jurisdiction over cut off island eventually went to the nation's highest court.

The Supreme Court sided with Iowa on the basis that state lines remain the same when a river avulsed or dramatically alters its path, as it did in 1877.

So the land never left Iowa despite its position on the Nebraska side of the river.

In the early 20th century, the area continued to flourish as a recreational hotspot.

Although Carter Lake was legally considered part of Council Bluffs, residents paid city taxes but lacked many of the city utilities.

Eventually, residents were fed up.

The community successfully seceded from Council Bluffs in the 1920s, intending to become part of Omaha, Nebraska, but Omaha wouldn't provide the services the area needed.

Finally, in 1930, by a vote of 171 to 124, residents approved Carter Lake's incorporation as a municipality in the state of Iowa, giving birth to the geographical oddity of a lone Iowa city accessible only by Nebraska roads.

Carter Lake's unique position on Nebraska's side of the river has created its fair share of confusion and legal issues.

It has one of the shortest highways in the state Iowa Highway 165.

As you leave Eppley Airfield in Omaha, you immediately enter and then leave the state of Iowa.

Despite the abnormality, Carter Lake stands as its own thing, a land locked in Omaha that is unique.

Iowa community.

Well as you can imagine, this house was something really different for Mason City in 1908.

The features that are really important to Frank Lloyd Wrights version of the Prairie School...

The bands of windows, contiguous windows together.

The edge of the roof line that makes a broad, horizontal statement.

Also, you have this thick and thin trim.

Instead of stopping at the edge of the wall, it bleeds off to the sides, which emphasizes that horizontal effect.

Your eyes dont stop at the edge It leads off, and directs your eyes out.

All of those things make it that when you come around the corner, and see the house theres no questions that this is a Prairie School home.

As you come up into the house, you can see that you get a vista not only of the living room area but through the veranda, and a large window.

So it makes it a very open feeling house.

Throughout the house, youll see symmetry as something that is a theme in the design.

Along with the symmetry, the trim in the house reflects the concept of ‘horizontality So we have this very wide trim along the walls and just down from the ceiling that is uniform throughout the house in all of the ro The group that put the furniture in the house tried to immitate the design features of the furniture, as well as, keeping the house as it was.

Some of the other things on the wall, is an article from the New York Times talking about the moving of the house and the saving of it.

I like the headline: ‘Averting a Wright Wrong.

I hope you enjoy it, and enjoy your time in Mason City.

Michael Morain: These days we are so used to ordering everything we could ever want online with a few clicks of a button.

But not so long ago, people browsed actual catalogs made from real paper for all kinds of things, toys and kitchen gadgets and clothes.

Of course, the Sears catalog is the most famous catalog of all.

But it offered so much more.

In the Sears catalog, you could even browse through and order through the mail a home.

♪♪ Michael Morain: Sears no longer prints catalogs, and not surprisingly they no longer manufacture houses.

But, from 1908 to 1940, they sold about 75,000 mail order houses.

There were more than 350 styles of homes.

The homes ranged from $360 to about $3,000, which in today's terms is about $10,000 up to $80,000.

So they were marketing these homes really to middle class Americans.

♪♪ Michael Morain: When customers ordered their houses through the mail, the shipment would come usually on the rail.

So a boxcar would arrive with an average of 30,000 parts and 25 tons on average.

So, it was up to the customer to figure out how to get it from the train station to the plot of land where they wanted to actually build the house.

Michael Morain: 100 years ago when these houses were really popular you couldn't just go and watch a how-to video on YouTube, you had to figure out -- you either had to find an expert who knew how to do it, a local carpenter or somebody really handy or you had to follow along the instructions printed step-by-step for 75 pages to make sure that you're building your house right.

♪♪ Michael Morain: It's hard to pinpoint exactly how many are in Iowa because they are often hard to recognize unless you're inside the house.

So we don't know, but it's likely that there are hundreds including in Corning and Solon, Fort Madison.

I know there's one in Bussey too.

♪♪ Michael Morain: These DIY kit homes, the styles ranged pretty significantly.

So they're hard to immediately identify.

But you can do it if you're inside.

Sometimes the rafters or sheet rock or plumbing elements were stamped with SR for Sears Roebuck.

I know some of the bathtubs there is a little SR in one of the lower corners of the bathtub farthest from the faucet.

So, if you know the owners well enough to snoop around their bathtub you can identify it that way.

♪♪ ♪♪ Michael Morain: I think it's important to remember that the mail order homes, from Sears at least, started in 1908, which was the same year that the Model T first rolled off the conveyor belt at Ford.

So, a lot of Americans were purchasing cars.

Cars were a new thing.

And that allowed families to move a little bit out of the city's center, so suburbs started developing.

So people had space to build their own home and a lot of building materials were first being invented and developed and engineered around the same time.

Sheet rock was a big development because people could just install that rather than hiring a plaster expert.

So there were lots of ways that things became more automated and more mass produced and Americans figured that out really in lots of different ways, both marketers and consumers.

♪♪ Michael Morain: Mail order homes continued through 1940 through Sears and then with World War II building supplies were in short supply.

There was all of the materials were going to the war effort.

And then after the war when soldiers returned, to start the baby boom really, suburbs began developing in a different way where developers and construction companies built big tracts of land rather than relying on the individual families to build their own home.

♪♪ Michael Morain: I think today when so much is accessible with a couple of clicks on our iPhone and Amazon delivers whatever you want, toothpaste or cat food or whatever, the idea that your grandparents ordered 30,000 spare parts over the rail lines and built a house that your family may still own, these are very tangible brick and mortar souvenirs of an interesting, innovative time in American history.

♪♪ ♪♪ Mike Cook: My name is Mike Cook.

I'm our Plant Operations Manager here at the Independence Mental Health Institute and then I also take care of the museum.

♪♪ Mike Cook: We are currently standing on the 3rd floor of the Reynolds building, which was the first building built here.

They started construction on it in 1868.

So, where we're standing now would have been one of the male wards many, many years ago.

♪♪ Mike Cook: The history of the hospital is really pretty fascinating.

It is going on 150 years.

It has been here a long time.

It has always been owned by the state.

It has always been a state mental hospital.

We are the second state mental hospital in Iowa, Mount Pleasant was the first.

And that has been its purpose, it has gone through several different changes over the years as far as treatments and that type of thing, but the hospital has always continued to serve some of the best care that the mentally ill can have.

It has always kind of been a catch-all, it houses a lot of the very seriously mentally ill that other places are not capable of housing or handling.

♪♪ Mike Cook: Up until the 1800s there really wasn't a mental hospital, a hospital to serve the mentally ill. And it was looked upon much differently then than it is looked upon today, a lot of times your relatives would simply lock you in an attic bedroom or a basement room or you would be dumped off at a county poor farm or something.

But the conditions you lived in were horrible, they were never very good, there wasn't any place you could get any kind of help or any place that you would even be treated with respect or dignity.

♪♪ Mike Cook: Dr. Thomas Kirkbride is a very interesting, very fascinating person and he was able to come up with his design, his Kirkbride architecture.

So, his view was you built this huge big beautiful building, this big castle almost, out in the middle of the country.

Most of them, all of them were basically built in the country because that gave you the opportunity to have farmland and you could have crops and animals, but it also gave you the opportunity to have nature trails and this type of thing.

So, that was kind of all of his, his idea was you would take these people who life has not been very kind to or treated very well, and you would put them in this huge big castle and you would treat them with respect and dignity.

♪♪ Mike Cook: The museum tells a lot, honestly.

One of the most important things I think is the museum really paints a picture of the patients.

And everything is from the nearly 150 years the hospital has been here.

Being in maintenance, obviously, we're in every little nook and cranny and everywhere so we're always finding things.

A lot of the dressers, a lot of the furniture, a lot of the furniture the patients made, a lot of art work, a lot of the art work has been done by the patients.

We've always had a real big activities program for the patients from the beginning and we still do today.

Mike Cook: And things are set up, each room is kind of set up in its own thing.

So the kitchen display, all the old kitchen utilities, and at the height of our population we had over 1,800 patients, so cooking was quite a chore.

Some of the different treatments that were done here, the electric shock treatment, for example, the first electric shock treatment that was used here that is on display here.

We also have two trocars that were used during the transorbital lobotomies when that kind of took place through the 1940s and '50s.

Medical equipment from the lab and the pharmacy and also that was just used in the exam rooms.

A big library display, we have a lot of the books that were originally used back in the 1860s and 1870s that were here.

So it's a wide range, but it all centers around the hospital and the patients and how it has changed over the nearly 150 years that it has been here.

♪♪ Mike Cook: You know, history in general is just extremely important for everybody to know.

History always kind of repeats itself and we need to know our past and our history and learn from that to try to move forward and learn what worked and what didn't work and what methods were the best and why types of treatments really had the greatest effect and that kind of stuff because mental illness isn't going to go away, the same as with any kind of major illness.

And we can learn from that and come up with better treatments and better ways to deal with that to help those people cope and have a more positive, productive life.

♪♪ rivalry between the University of Iowa Hawkeyes and University of Minnesota Golden Gophers would revolve around a pig from Fort Dodge, Iowa?

There's now a new work of public art that shares the story This is more than just a pig, a traveling trophy between Iowa and Minnesota football.

There is a racial element to it.

And what a terrific story how two Governors resolved a racial tension issue with a pig for Fort Dodge.

♪♪ Gary Dolphin: Good morning, everybody.

We gather here today in North Central Iowa, the home of Floyd of Rosedale, the most widely recognized trophy in all of college football.

So here we are today to officially dedicate the great Floyd memory, the trophy, on the grounds where he was born.

♪♪ My name is Dave Flattery.

I am a banker with Availa Bank here in Fort Dodge.

My name is Randy Kuhlman.

I am the CEO of the Fort Dodge Community Foundation here in Fort Dodge.

My name is Jim Kersten.

I live here in Fort Dodge with my wife Laurie.

Flattery: I come from a family of six.

Five of us are Iowa State grads.

Three are actually letter winners at Iowa State, three of us played baseball at Iowa State.

But my mother was always an Iowa fan.

Well, she passed away in 2013.

And she would always tell us that Floyd of Rosedale was from Fort Dodge.

Kersten: The Rosedale Farm was out where Floyd now is located.

And so as kids we used to go out there and we didn't really understand the significance of Floyd of Rosedale at all.

Flattery: So in '34, Iowa was visiting Minnesota and Iowa had a black running back by the name of Ozzie Simmons.

At the time, there were very few African-Americans playing Division I football and I believe he was second team All-American.

Ronald Reagan broadcast that game for WHO.

And he thought that Ozzie Simmons was one of the best running backs that he had ever seen.

So they travel up to Minnesota and they mistreat him.

And he came off the field several times injured and the fans, the Iowa fans were not happy, the Iowa Governor wasn't happy.

And so there was a lot of tension from 1934 to '35 to the point where they didn't know if they were going to even play the game, from what I understand.

And so Minnesota came down to Iowa City and I believe they stayed in the Quad Cities because there was a lot of tension in Iowa City.

♪♪ Flattery: So on the eve of the game, the night before, Floyd B. Olson, the Governor of Minnesota, wired Clyde Herring and said hey, to resolve this difference let's just have a wager.

And so, they wager a live piece of pork.

Whoever lost that game would have to present a live piece of pork to the winning Governor.

♪♪ Flattery: Al Loomis, he had a prize piece of livestock on his farm, which was the Rosedale Farm.

And so he called the Iowa Governor and he says, hey I've got this prized piece of livestock, he's the brother to Blue Boy.

Blue Boy was in the movie State Fair, the original movie State Fair.

And so sure enough he was a prized piece of livestock.

And so they actually walked it into the Statehouse, the Capitol, and presented a live piece of swine to the winning Governor and that was Floyd B. Olson.

And they named him Floyd, of course after the Governor, and then the Rosedale Farms.

Three, two, one.

Cut away, Terry Branstad.

All right.

Welcome Floyd of Rosedale to his true home indeed.

(applause) Flattery: What better way to bring recognition to Fort Dodge and to a great story and the possibility of building a statue that retains the story, the legacy.

And so I thought it was a neat idea.

I made some calls.

And I'm not sure, no, I had nobody that said hey, that's not a very good idea.

Kuhlman: We were really looking for something that represented it well but couldn't be exactly like it but also had a real artistic component to it.

And ultimately Dale Merrill, the sculptor out of Mount Vernon, presented his project to the committee and it was unanimously supported.

And when Dave and I, we went down there when Dale was working putting the project together, we went into his studio and we were extremely surprised by number one, the size of it, number two, that it is really made out of six layers of steel.

So it is really, the artistic design is absolutely amazing.

It's quite a structure.

But it has also got a real artistic look to it as well.

♪♪ Kersten: I think the significance going back to the '30s and resolving a racial issue by a friendly bet between two Governors was priceless.

And I think over the last maybe 10 or 15 or 20 years with leadership in Fort Dodge, public and private, we truly are showing the country how things can get done.

And I think this is an example of a variety of people coming together to raise a lot of money privately and for a good cause.

So I think it's a real good message to send not only Iowa, but the country, that leaders need to sit down and figure out solutions.

♪♪ Flattery: In a sense, this is kind of a legacy to my mom too is that all these years she talked about Floyd of Rosedale and she kept the articles.

And so, yeah, maybe it's a legacy to my mom as well and her belief in the Hawkeyes.

She would have been very proud to know that hey, there's a statue commemorating Floyd of Rosedale and all the characters that were associated with it.

♪♪ Thanks for joining us as we explore the unique stories of our state.

I'm Charity Nebbe.

See you next time for another episode of Greetings from Iowa.

[music] Funding for Greetings from Iowa is provided by with our Iowa roots and Midwestern values.

Farmers Mutual hail is committed to offering innovative farm insurance for America's farmers, just as we have for six generations.

Farmers Mutual Hail America's crop insurance company the Pella Roll Screen Foundation is a proud supporter of Iowa PBS, Pella Windows and Doors Drives to better our communities and build a better tomorrow