The Nevada area is right smack dab in the middle of a very interesting story when it comes to this year’s RAGBRAI route, and some of you may have no idea what ‘claim to fame’ (shown by the little red dot above) this community’s rural area is sitting on.
Forty-seven years ago, in 1979, a team of very smart math/science guys who called themselves the “techno-twits” discovered that the “geographical center” of the State of Iowa was located right here in Story County, about 6 miles northwest of Nevada, just off County Road E-29.
The “geographical center” is located on property that is owned by Loren and Ruth Book. It was written about in 1979 by well-known Des Moines Register columnist Chuck Offenburger. Ruth and Loren explain what it means that their property holds the geographical center of Iowa: If you were to sit the State of Iowa on a post, this is the point where you’d put the post and could balance the entire state on it.
The property that holds the geographical center of Iowa has been in the Book family for more than 50 years. It was owned by Loren’s father in 1979, but it was Loren who happened to be out and about when two of the techno-twits and the Register reporter came to see the piece of land in person.
The techno-twits estimated they’d spent 750 hours working in Grinnell College’s Darby Gym on the college’s computer – a Digital Equipment Corporation model PDP 11/70 – to find where the geographical center of the state would be. At that point in time, they had to use large-scale topographical maps and “digitize” the state’s borders. The computer’s records noted that the computer itself worked 17 hours, 35 minutes, and 17 seconds on the project once the techno-twits had loaded all the necessary information into it.
The two techno-twits who visited the piece of land were Mark Grundler, who was the project leader, and Scott R. Porter, a 21-year-old senior at Grinnell College, who became the project captain.
And here’s where the story becomes more interesting and connects to RAGBRAI, which will roll right past Iowa’s center point next week.
Porter, who now lives in Florida, will ride in RAGBRAI and wants to stop for a photo with Loren Book at the site of the Geographical Center of the state that he helped locate 47 years ago.
“I feel a connection to the spot,” Porter tells us. “I am certainly not on a ‘farewell tour,’ but when I saw [RAGBRAI] was going down that portion of E29, I knew I needed to try and visit the location again.”
Porter has been participating in RAGBRAI since 2012 with the Iowa Farm Bureau team, and admits that whenever the ride goes through central Iowa, he checks the final route to see if it will go by the geographical center of the state, or how far the route would be from it. This year, RAGBRAI is right on the money.
“I am surprised there has been no mention by RAGBRAI about this year’s route going by the location,” Porter said. “Maybe they don’t know the history of the area.”
Honestly, we’re not sure how many locals recall that the geographical center of the state is right here in Story County. The Books say that after the fun of having Offenburger write about it in 1979, very little came of the discovery. Perhaps this year’s RAGBRAI will renew interest in it.
The Books say they’re hoping to put up a sign of some sort or possibly an Iowa Flag along E-29 so that riders can stop and take a picture by the sign, knowing that the geographical center of Iowa is about 200 feet behind them in a soybean field.
Because the field has crops and has also been quite wet in recent weeks, the Books don’t want people in the field, but they will make one exception. That will be for Porter.
They plan to meet with him the morning of July 22 and take him right back to the actual spot in the field. Ruth even plans to make a sign like the one that Grundler and Porter stood by in 1979, which said, “This is the place” with an arrow pointing to the ground.
And the Books are also advocating for permanent signage along E-29 that will designate the piece of land as Iowa’s Geographical Center.
Asked about the work that was involved back in the day to locate this center spot and how technology today might have made it easier, Porter said the computer work would have been much faster. “The computing power is probably billions, if not billions of billions, times faster.” But the input data? “I am not sure the input data for the calculation is any more readily available today than it was then,” he said.
But, with the GPS technology we have today, he confided, “It certainly is easier to go to the spot and be confident of being in the right location.”
–Written by Marlys Barker, City of Nevada