Coggon to Zwingle
The Iowa Barn Foundation holds a spring and fall barn tour each year. This fall, of 2022, marked my 9th outing in the tour. There was the year I missed to attend an arts festival and then, of course, Covid. The spring tour is typically smaller, with emphasis on a certain portion of the state. I like this tour because I can take more time and still see more barns. The fall is always a full state tour. This requires a little more focus and prep work.
Narrowing down my trip meant being realistic. My biggest frustration about the fall tour is that I always feel hurried and going back through photos is often disappointing because I never feel like I’ve quite captured the story. This year I wanted to change that and decided that I needed to treat it like the spring tour and limit my choice to a smaller area.
I spent both days poking around the southern part of Northeast, Iowa. Roughly, Waterloo to Maquoketa. I wish I could tell you that I made my decision based on a lot of thought and planning, but I cannot. I did spend time looking at my maps and reading about the different barns but ultimately it came down to just following my gut. There were approximately 60 barns on the tour and about 10 that I absolutely wanted to see. Problem is some were near Nebraska and others near Dubuque. When I woke up that Saturday morning my mood, instinct, gut, whatever you want to call it sent me east.
I love this tour, but it became very evident, very quickly that this trip was less about the barns than the views. While I maybe had not planned out my exact trip, once I picked the direction, my stops were easy to determine. I drove by my first stop, twice. I had not realized that it was not an actual open barn until later, my fault, but there also was not the normal signage. A little peeved, I pressed on to my next stop. I toured three barns on Saturday, not because I didn’t want to see more but because I got so caught up in the location.
If you head east out of Waterloo on highway 20 you pass through Independence, Manchester and Dyserville. It’s around Dyersville that you notice a rapid change in the typography of the landscape. Flat open fields transitioned into rolling hills and terraced farmland. Feeling things going off the rails I pulled over, located the nearest barn I wanted to see and took to the backroads. I found myself in immersed in some of the prettiest parts of Iowa I have seen.
There is a phase I enter sometimes when I’m taking pictures. I get so caught up in what I’m doing that entire afternoons pass with little awareness of the time at all. I had never heard of Coggon or Zwingle, Ia but that afternoon I drove between them in a trance. Golden fields, abandon barns, cemeteries with views for miles, a turquoise roofed farm…this is what I do the tour for. Skyline, buncombe, lambe…all roads I could never find on my own. All leading to some amazing views that remind me how lucky I am to live in such a place.
