« St. Augustine Photos | Main | Great Plains Roadtrip: Haverhill to Deadwood »
July 4, 2006
Great Plains Roadtrip: Haverhill, IA
Click here to view the photo gallery.
I arrived in Minneapolis late Saturday night and went straight to bed, then hit the road on Saturday for the drive to Haverhill, IA, a very small town which is the ancestral home of my mom's side of the family. It's just outside Marshalltown and, although none of my family lives there now, it's where my great grandparents are buried so it was chosen as the site of this year's family gathering.
Haverhill, although it only has a population of about one hundred people (and that's probably pushing it) has a historic blacksmith shop which was started by a German immigrant named Matthew Edel in the 1880s. It's on the National Register of Historic Places and was one of the sites that we stopped at in a walk around town. The shop has been nearly untouched since 1940 (as the photos will attest) - exactly the kind of place that I love taking photos of. As our family looked around the shop, someone discovered the name of my great-great-grandfather written on a piece of cardboard on the ceiling. There was a metal rod attached to the beam and that's where his horseshoes would've been hung once the blacksmith had finished making them. It was pretty exciting to see a concrete link to my own personal past in this historic building.
Posted on July 4, 2006 at 11:08 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.manyhighways.com/admin/mt/mt-tb.cgi/152
Comments
I used to live across the street from this shop!
We loved to peek in the windows and make up ghost stories.
Posted by: Laurie at November 8, 2006 12:38 PM