Des Moines, IA, to Lincoln, NE
About an hour southwest of Des Moines is Madison County, setting for the 1995 film “The Bridges of Madison County”, and birthplace of an American icon. Winterset, the county seat, is home to around 5,500 people. The town was founded in 1849 and flourished in the late 1800’s. The magnificent 1876 Madison County courthouse, nestled in a lush green plaza in the center of town, dominates the skyline for miles around.
The four blocks fronting on the courthouse square form a National Historic District and look much the same as they did in the late 1800’s. The 1995 film sparked a bit of a renaissance in Winterset as a weekend destination for visitors and the storefronts around the square include several providing “country chic” to tourists.
While the covered bridges in the surrounding countryside and the charming downtown core are certainly tourist draws, they are not the main attraction in Winterset. Winterset’s place in history was firmly established on May 26, 1907, when Marion Robert Morrison was born in a small frame house two blocks southeast of the courthouse. Today Marion’s legacy, under his much more well-known screen name of John Wayne, is celebrated in a museum next to his boyhood home.
Clyde Morrison, Marion’s father, was a pharmacist who worked at the M.E.Smith drugstore across from the courthouse (it is now the Village Bootery, easily visible in the first picture above of the city center.) The small home that they lived in was originally built in the 1880’s and has been restored to resemble what it might have looked like when the Morrison family lived there.
The house consists of four rooms with a small addition tacked on the back.
The kitchen occupies a sunny northeast corner of the house.
The small addition on the back was the “summer kitchen”, used during the hot months for cooking so that the heat generated from the stove could be kept out of the main house.
When Marion was three the family moved to nearby Earlham where Mr. Morrison opened his own pharmacy. In 1914 the Morrison’s moved to California, initially settling in the Lancaster area on a homestead and attempting to farm. The desert conditions were not conducive to farming so a couple of years later they moved to Glendale where Mr. Morrison again took up his trade as a pharmacist. Glendale is where Marion earned the nickname “Duke.” The family dog was “Duke” and every day he would follow Marion to school, walking past Glendale Fire Station No. 1. The firemen soon became used to seeing the duo and began referring to Marion as “Little Duke.” Marion liked the nickname and began referring to himself as Duke Morrison. A picture at the time shows the Morrison family including Duke, his younger brother, and the dog. Note the strong family resemblance between Mr. Morrison and the adult John Wayne.
Years later while a student at the University of Southern California, Duke worked part time as a prop man at Fox Studios. He drew the attention of a director who cast him in the film “The Big Trail”. The studio came up with the name John Wayne as short, memorable and strong. The rest, as they say, is history…
The John Wayne Birthplace Museum is the only museum in the world dedicated to John Wayne. The low, California-style building occupies a corner and the sidewalk surrounding the museum is lined with stone markers, one for each of his films.
As with many museums, one enters through the gift shop. To one side is a mock theater marquee beckoning one into a small theater that shows a brief history of John Wayne’s movie career. Viewers sit in original seats from Grauman’s Chinese Theater in Hollywood.
Across the gift shop is the museum, containing a mixture of movie memorabilia and personal effects. Wayne was known to live a relatively simply life and his 1972 Pontiac Grand Safari was the same model that anyone else could buy, except this one has been modified to accommodate John Wayne’s six foot-four inch frame.
One of Wayne’s favorite film partners was Maureen Sullivan. The two appeared together in a series of films during the 1950’s, perhaps the most memorable was “The Quiet Man” (1952), director John Ford’s tribute to his homeland of Ireland. In the days before the automobile arrived in Ireland and up into the 1970’s in the countryside, the horse drawn jaunting car (or sidecar) was the preferred mode of transportation. This is the original jaunting car used throughout the movie, Maureen Sullivan purchased it after the filming of the movie and kept it at her home in Ireland.
The early 1950’s also saw a series of films that established John Wayne as major star in western films. A series of cabinets showcases costumes and props he used in those films.
After a lull, the film “True Grit” 40 years into his career brought John Wayne to the attention of a new generation of movie fans. When he accepted his Oscar for the role (his only Oscar) from Barbara Streisand Wayne leaned over and whispered in her ear “beginner’s luck.” For 25 years, beginning with “The Leatherneck” and ending with “The Shootist” in 1976, Wayne designed and distributed souvenir mugs to all of the cast and crew of each film. They have become valuable collector’s items.
An interesting look at the roots of an American icon. Before leaving Winterset, a brief look at the “other” side of Main Street. While the Morrison house is clearly in a middle class neighborhood from around the turn of the 20th century, the other side of Main Street has a number of more opulent homes from the wealthy of the same era.
The roots of the American experience run deeply through Winterset, Iowa. Our road now takes us due west from Winterset towards the Missouri River Valley. At first the land spreads out in gentle waves that roll towards the horizon in every direction.
About twenty miles east of the river the waves grow more distinct as the highway crosses the unique “loess” hills of western Iowa. When the glaciers west of the Missouri receded during the last Ice Age they left behind huge mud flats that repeatedly flooded and dried over the ages, leaving a finely ground soil that the westerly winds blew across the prairie in huge dust clouds. The coarser grains of soil fell to the ground on the east side of the river, creating a long line of hills running north/south. As the highway crosses these hills it’s kind of like driving along the edge of a lasagna noodle…
Crossing the Missouri River and heading about sixty miles into the interior of Nebraska, the buildings of downtown Lincoln rise above the prairie. The distinctive spire of the Nebraska State Capitol rises above the city center.
Lincoln, Nebraska
The first city in the area was founded in 1856 and named Lancaster. Eleven years later the village of Lancaster was designated the state capital of Nebraska and renamed Lincoln. Today nearly 300,000 people live in the metropolitan area with the downtown core dominated by the University of Nebraska on the north and the state capitol building to the south. This is actually the third building in Lincoln to serve as the state capitol. The first two, one completed in 1868 and the other in 1888, were both built with a more traditional design but suffered from poor construction and inferior building stone. In 1919 the Nebraska State Legislature passed a bill to provide for the construction of a new capitol and a nationwide design competition was held. Bertram Grosvenor Goodhue won the competition with a striking modern design that include an office tower. The structure was built in four phases and was completed in 1932. Occupying an entire city block, the design evokes Nebraska with a broad two story square base setting the stage for the landmark tower rising above the prairie. The main entrance on the north side overlooks a plaza that stretches a number of blocks to the north.
The city center towers rise just northwest of the plaza blocks.
The first impression that one gets when entering the ground floor is how dark the interior appears. The interior hallways on both of the two floors that make up the base intersect under the office tower, forming a cross. The exterior walls of the square base are lined with offices to there is no natural light in the interior of the first floor.
The second floor is actually the main floor and here the halls are two stories tall with arched windows at each end and in the central rotunda let in light. The four halls intersect in the middle in a magnificent rotunda with detailed mosaics on the floor.
Each corner of the central rotunda houses the staircases between the two levels. The handrails are carved of stone and inset into the walls.
The stone walls give way to magnificent tiled ceilings and murals representing various aspects of life in Nebraska.
Nebraska has the nation’s only unicameral legislature. What that means is that instead of having a separate House of Representatives and Senate, there is only one legislative body, in this case called the Senate. The Senate Chambers are on the west side of the rotunda.
After just visiting the ornate capitol buildings in South Dakota and Iowa, the contrast in architectural styles was striking. I really was reminded of a medieval castle on the inside.
On the southeast corner across from the capitol building is one of Lincoln’s oldest homes. From 1854 to 1867 the capital of Nebraska Territory was Omaha. When statehood dawned in 1867 a commission was formed to select the new site. Two years later showplace homes were built for the commissioners in the new capital of Lincoln in an effort to bolster confidence in the future of the town. One of those homes, the Kennard House, is the only one still standing and is the oldest house within the original plat of Lincoln.
Next door is the Ferguson House, built by a successful Lincoln businessman in 1911.
Lest we get too excited about a reverence for historical buildings next door to the Ferguson House is a classic Victorian, clearly of age, now in use as a fraternity house…
Lincoln is also home to a unique institution that strives to protect the heritage of a specific group key to the development of a swath of the Mid-West from North Dakota down to Kansas, German immigrants from Russia. This strikes deeply into my personal roots as my great-grandparents were two of those immigrants.
Next Up: German-Americans from Russia
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