Unexpected Iowa (10 Photos)

There is more to Iowa than corn

A baseball field from a movie, a troll taking back his tree, a grotto of crystals one priest built by hand. Ten stops across Iowa, from Sioux City to the Mississippi, for anyone who thinks the state is just fields.

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🕊️ “Hope Is a Thing with Sequins” — By Naomi Haverland in Sioux City, Iowa, USA 🇺🇸

The window is painted, and so is the boy. Naomi Haverland painted him in 2023 on the side of the Heidman Law Firm Building at 1128 4th Street, lowering a homemade paper bird over the parking lot.

💡 Poem Fact: The title is a nod to Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope is the thing with feathers”, which compares hope to a bird.

More: Naomi Haverland’s Mind-Blowing 3D Murals

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🌳 “Helmut” — By Thomas Dambo in Clinton, Iowa, USA 🇺🇸

Helmut is one of three troll brothers in The Tree Thieves, built in 2026 from local reclaimed wood. In Dambo’s story, Clinton’s sawmills cut down the forest where the trolls slept and floated the logs down the Mississippi. The trolls followed. Helmut is taking his tree back.

💡 Lumber Fact: Clinton was a major lumber town from 1870 to 1940. The project was made with The Sawmill Museum and Bickelhaupt Arboretum, and Helmut’s brothers, Warren and Marwin, wait elsewhere in Clinton.

More: Three Giant Trolls Followed Their Stolen Trees to Iowa (8 Photos)

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📷 Photo: Thomas Dambo

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💎 Grotto of the Redemption — West Bend, Iowa, USA 🇺🇸

One priest started this in 1912 and kept going for 42 years. Father Paul Dobberstein covered the grotto in West Bend with petrified wood, jasper, malachite, quartz crystals and other stones, in nine grottos that tell the life of Jesus.

💡 Size Fact: It is described as the largest man-made grotto in the world.

📷 Photo: Alejandro Pulido / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🌉 Roseman Covered Bridge — Winterset, Madison County, Iowa, USA 🇺🇸

Yes, that Madison County. Built in 1883, the 104-foot bridge over the Middle River near Winterset was in The Bridges of Madison County. Clint Eastwood wanted it to look older, so the crew weathered it, and workmen had to repaint it after filming.

💡 Local Legend: Locals call it haunted. According to the story, in 1892, a sheriff’s posse trapped an escaped inmate inside from both ends, and he was never found.

📷 Photo: Ymblanter / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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🚡 Fenelon Place Elevator — Dubuque, Iowa, USA 🇺🇸

A banker built this railway so he could get home for dinner and a nap. In 1882 J.K. Graves worked at the bottom of the hill, lived at the top and found the commute cut into his routine, so he put in a private incline. Today two little cars still run the 296 feet up the bluff in Dubuque.

💡 Record Fact: It calls itself the world’s shortest, steepest railroad. Atlas Obscura notes that the claim is hard to verify.

📷 Photo: Teemu008 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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🌬️ Danish Windmill — Elk Horn, Iowa, USA 🇺🇸

This windmill spent its first 128 years in Denmark. Jens Olesen built it in 1848 near Nørre Snede, Denmark. It was taken apart, shipped across the Atlantic and reached Elk Horn in February 1976, where more than 300 volunteers put it back together.

💡 Mill Fact: It is the only working Danish windmill in the United States, and the sails still turn when the wind is right.

📷 Photo: Smallbones / Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

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🦅 “Carry Love with You” — By Key Detail in Davenport, Iowa, USA 🇺🇸

Flowers, eagles and koi run the length of a record shop wall. Key Detail painted it in August 2026 on Ragged Records & Trash Can Annie, 311 E. 2nd Street, for Alternating Currents Mural Fest. The artist, an architect by training from Minsk, now lives in New York.

💡 Title Fact: The words are not on the wall. The title comes from the artist’s statement: “Carry love with you everywhere and let it bloom.”

More: Blue-Footed Boobies, a Robin Tribute and a Fish in a Bottle (20 Photos)

📷 Photo: Key Detail

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⛽ Behrens-Rapp Filling Station — Cedar Falls, Iowa, USA 🇺🇸

Brothers John and William Behrens built this little brick station in 1925. When a highway project threatened it, the whole building was moved in 1993 to First and Clay streets.

💡 Road Fact: It no longer sells gas. It is the town’s visitor information center, so you can still pull up and ask for directions.

📷 Photo: Carol M. Highsmith / Library of Congress (public domain)

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⚾ Field of Dreams — Dyersville, Iowa, USA 🇺🇸

The white farmhouse is the one from the 1989 movie. The diamond was cut into a cornfield outside Dyersville, and the film’s popularity led the farm owners, Don and Becky Lansing, to keep the field.

💡 Baseball Fact: In 2021 the White Sox beat the Yankees 9–8 in a real Major League game, played in a ballpark built next to the movie field.

More: The Movie Ended, the Set Stayed (10 Photos)

📷 Photo: Jana Taylor / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

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🌸 “Together We Bloom” — By Yanoe x Zoueh in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, USA 🇺🇸

Hands reach up through blue flowers on a parking garage stairwell. The Los Angeles duo Yanoe (Ryan Sarfati) and Zoueh (Eric Skotnes) painted it next to the DoubleTree hotel downtown, as a picture of a community growing together.

More: Together We Bloom by Yanoe x Zoueh

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