IOWA NEWS

CORRECTIONVILLE

IOWA  

08/30/98

Post Register

Category: Feature Living

Published: 08/30/98

Page: E1

Keywords: Travel

Byline: Clay Carpenter  

Crossing the Missouri River into western Iowa, you're in the pretty, glacier-formed Loess Hills. But this scenery doesn't last long. Around Holstein, the hills give way to the cornfields Iowa is famous for, and a lot of soybean fields, too. If it's fall - harvest time - this part of Iowa is especially pretty. Hope you remembered your bat and ball. You'll want to stop at the baseball diamond cut into a cornfield just outside of Dyersville, where the movie "Field of Dreams" was filmed in 1988. And there's another baseball thrill just up the road. Just keep driving (reading) to find out what.

HIGHWAY HIGHLIGHT: Correctionville gets its name because of a simple geometrical truth: You can't fit a square peg in a round hole. Or in this case, a bunch of square sections on a round object: the Earth. The earth curves at the top, so every land division can't be the same size. That's why surveyors used Correction Lines to divide the land. Adjustments were made along the Correction Lines to make each parcel roughly equal in size. In Correctionville, north-south streets are adjusted at the Fifth Street Correction Line. Because of this, the street "jogs" in the center of downtown - right near the hardware store. It's marked with a plaque.  

QUOTE: Ida Yaremko, proprietor of the Hillside Motel and Café in Correctionville, when asked how often in her 35 years of living in Correctionville she has told the story of the town's name: "Probably about five times a night. Every tourist who comes through wants to know, 'Where did that name come from, and where's the penitentiary?' ''