Thursday, September 22, 2011

September 21, 2011

East to the Mississippi

East again with the Mississippi River as our goal. But first, a serendipitous find.

Most of us probably remember one or more church hymns from childhood or our teens that seem to stick with us. For me one of those songs was/is "The Little Brown Church in the Vale". Every time I sang it I would picture a quaint little church nestled in a green, picturesque valley somewhere in New England. There would be trees turning color and maybe even a horse and buggy. Several days ago while researching our coming route I made an interesting discovery in the description of one of the towns. An exciting find right on our route. Just outside a small Iowa town we came around a bend in the road and there it was. In a grove of trees, on level ground, surrounded by miles and miles of Iowa corn fields, was the actual "Little Brown Church in the Vale".










There are several interesting facts about the song and the church but I will not try to relate them all. It is a very nice church inside and outside situated on immaculate grounds. Lots of care in keeping it up.
















Apparently there are others who feel some nostalgia with the song/church. To date more than 74,000 couples have been married in this church. That is not an error. 74,000+ .









There is a tradition that couples married in the church immediately proclaim their new status by jointly pulling the rope to ring the bell in the bell tower. This is the rope that goes through a hole in the narthex ceiling.














After the church, more drive east to the Mississippi. At the river we went north a few miles to our first National Park Service site for this trip. Effigy Mounds National Monument is a very small fractional preservation of the ceremonial/burial mounds created all over the eastern half of the continent by the early ancestors of the Native Americans. It is a quiet, pretty little park with excellent interpretive center and nice trail of about two miles that passes by a number of the mounds.





















Unmowed grass is actual mound(portion of one)











Mississippi River from bluff where mounds are located.











Spent the night in a quiet state park several miles south. Actually it is called Pikes Peak State Park. Same guy, several states removed :) .


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