Inauguration weekend. My partner, their housemate, and myself drove south to visit Hopeville, Iowa: a very small town with a very big graveyard.
I love wet winter days like this, the Andrew Wyeth counterpoint to our Grant Wood summers.
Hibernating by
M Raven, on Flickr
Doyle township contains no incorporated communities and the population at the time of the 2000 census was 200. The last statistic that I found for Hopeville, in an essay of unknown provenance (
http://iagenweb.or...len-Hope-Hist.html), said there were 36 people here in 1965, down from a robust 331 in the late 1800s.
Hopeville by
M Raven, on Flickr
Our first stop was the schoolhouse you can see down toward the end of the road in the above photo, an old heap identified with a sign that says "Site of Doyle #9 Hopeville Schoolhouse". A red fox slept on top of the covered entry to the cellar, but slipped away before I was able to take his photo.
Doyle # 9 Schoolhouse by
M Raven, on Flickr
Schoolhouse front hall by
M Raven, on Flickr
Milk barrel by
M Raven, on Flickr
Drawers by
M Raven, on Flickr
Schoolhouse front room by
M Raven, on Flickr
Schoolroom by
M Raven, on Flickr
The whole place was filled with an assortment of detritus, but things were beginning to trickle down into the basement which we had an alright view of through the crumbling foundation and I wasn't about to chance it farther than the entry.
Stand by
M Raven, on Flickr
A little ways up the muddy track, this place waited for us, one of these windowless old wrecks that's spoiling for a ghost story or three. Another structure I wasn't willing to enter bodily, but I was very taken with it.
Ghost story by
M Raven, on Flickr
Kitchen door by
M Raven, on Flickr
Kitchen by
M Raven, on Flickr
Back room by
M Raven, on Flickr
Backyard by
M Raven, on Flickr
We stopped by the cemetery on the way out of town. It clearly exceeds the town's living population by several times, divided roughly in half between two gentle hills with a depression in the middle where I imagine the ground and the water table aren't conducive to burials. The other side was obviously home to the more recently dead, and our interest was focused on the older stones, many of which dated back into the mid-1800s.
Hopeville Cemetery by
M Raven, on Flickr
Sister by
M Raven, on Flickr
Hillside by
M Raven, on Flickr
Watcher by
M Raven, on Flickr
Our further adventures took us through another town, whose population has been steadily falling since the same time as Hopeville's peak, though a little over a hundred people are reported to still live there today. It still has a post office, though it is the sole thing that remains in-tact downtown.
Downtown by
M Raven, on Flickr
The space between. by
M Raven, on Flickr
Waiting by
M Raven, on Flickr
Where do we go, when it's all over? by
M Raven, on Flickr
We commenced to get badly lost (and almost stuck) in part of the Stephens State Forest that doesn't say it's part of the Stephens State Forest on the map, and says it has a road that goes all the way through it but does not, in pursuit of Last Chance, IA. We would have gone from there to a town called Zero on the old Mormon Trail, but the roads were too wet and silty. In my part of the state, everything is well-groomed crushed limestone and the drainage is good out on the farm roads. I do most of my exploring in a small front-wheel drive compact car. In this area, my friend's Subaru was having significant difficulties, so we had to cut things short and head back to the highway so we could get home before rehearsal that evening. I'm eager to get back to the Mormon Trail and a stretch of state highway along which we saw several properties which deserve another look.
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