Hello, my name is Bill Teeple, Greetings from Fairfield, Iowa.

There's always been an interesting cultural underpinnings in Fairfield.

And it's always had a certain character.

And the Roman stuff was collected by S.M.H.

Buyers.

When the transcendental meditation people bought Parsons College, People came from all over the country and all over the world to attend classes here.

We're standing in front of the Vedic observatory on the Maharishi International University campus.

Each one of these instruments measure some different part of time of astronomy, a planet movement, that type of thing.

So it drew cultural types from the big city.

The magic was that there was this marriage between Midwestern small town, straightforward, practical thinking and the all these contemporary ideas from the from the coast.

We are the first of 1,689 Carnegie Library buildings that are Andrew Carnegie funded.

He had connections at the Smithsonian.

And the furniture in that alcove are all items that belong to the Parsons family.

I'm like a lot of people like kids in high school.

You can't wait to leave and you're never going to come back.

But circumstances brought me back.

And if you want a better picture of Annie Woods, you can go online and find her.

Since I've taken over the job of director of the Carnegie Museum, I'm discovering things about this town that just knocked my socks off.

The Maasdam Barns is this venue here in Fairfield, Iowa.

It was owned back in the early 1900s by Jacob Maasdam.

When they come to Fairfield, they're going to see a lot of rich history of what things was like in the early 1900s and that really laid claim to Fairfield.

Then the story was that William Loudon went to a livestock exposition.

Henry Ford was there seeing these apparatuses, and then him and Henry Ford got together because he wanted to put these in the car plants.

This would have been early 1900.

I live in Fairfield because I'm at home here.

I know the surroundings, but I also enjoy this, the city atmosphere that, like a lot of our students have brought.

So you get a taste of what else is out there in the world that typically that you don't see if you're living in Fairfield all the time.

I like Fairfield because of the variety.

And so you can walk about in Fairfield and hear foreign languages being spoken and eat out authentic ethnic restaurants.

And so you really get that kind of world experience in a small town in Iowa.

Wow.

Yeah.

Lifelong from 2020 to 2021.

I grew up in Alabama.

Before this 13 years in Asheville, North Carolina.

My wife, she grew up here.

Melting pot.

It's a very unique, culturally diverse town in the middle of nowhere.

I wouldn't want to be anywhere else but Fairfield because this this small, manageable human level lifestyle they can have in a small town is is has combined with one of the more unique cultural combinations going here in Fairfield.