Kohlsdorf: On this episode of "Road Trip Iowa," we're traveling the Iowa Valley Scenic Byway.

We'll explore a rich cultural tapestry from the Meskwaki settlement to the Amana Colonies...

Thank you so much.

You have a great day.

...with stops at the hidden gems along the way.

Who has that chocolate cake?

Next, on "Road Trip Iowa."

Woman: Kwik Star is proud to be a part of Iowa communities across the state.

Family owned for over 50 years, we’re dedicated to treating our guests, employees, and communities as we would like to be treated.

Man: Musco Lighting is an Iowa company that travels across the U.S. and to more than 125 countries to light community recreation fields, stadiums, airports, monuments, and more.

While our reach is global, we’re committed to our local communities.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ The Iowa Valley Scenic Byway spans 77 miles through the Iowa River corridor, going through Tama, Benton, and Iowa Counties.

Multiple ethnic communities have settled along this trail, dating back centuries.

Today, they welcome visitors with open arms and give them a glimpse into their unique customs and traditions.

Let's take a look at our itinerary.

We'll visit an organic garden on a Native American settlement, take a drive through Iowa's own Bohemian Alps, stop at a historic roadside café, and explore a group of villages that were once part of a communal society.

But first, we take a detour just north of the byway to the small town of Traer, where one woman's seasoned hobby brought a little flavor to the community.

♪♪ In Northern Tama County, on display cases filled to capacity, sits a unique collection of kitchen utensils that has shaken up the town for nearly eight decades.

Young: Ruth Rasmussen, from here in Traer, started her collection in 1946, and she just kept collecting and kept collecting.

And by the time we showed some interest, she had 15,000 pairs of salt and pepper shakers in her very small house and two small outbuildings behind her house.

And she would show the shakers to anybody who stopped and knocked on her door.

She'd take them out through.

And she was very proud of her collection.

♪♪ Kohlsdorf: Rasmussen bought her first set of shakers in 1946, during a visit to the Brookfield Zoo outside Chicago.

She soon found herself part of a growing community of collectors.

In the 1940s and the 1950s, it was a very popular hobby.

Our grandmothers, our mothers, our aunts, and there were a lot of collectors out there.

They know each other from all over the country.

And they know us now, too, by the way.

[ Chuckles ] Kohlsdorf: By 1973, Rasmussen had acquired 10,000 sets.

In 1987, she was featured in the "Guinness Book of World Records" as owner of the world's largest salt and pepper shaker collection, with close to 13,000 pairs.

In 2007, with Rasmussen in her 80s, the city of Traer agreed to purchase and preserve the famed salt and pepper shakers.

There's just a lot -- lots of fun series.

I didn't know that they had made series of shakers.

And of course, she did.

And when she was collecting, then she would go like heck to, you know, complete a series, and we didn't even really appreciate that until we started working with the collection ourselves.

From 1946 until 2008, she wrote every purchase down.

A description, what she paid for them, when she bought them.

We just were bowed over by her.

♪♪ Kohlsdorf: Averaging close to a thousand annual visitors, Traer Salt and Pepper Shaker Gallery has received travelers from all over the world.

Young: Well, the admission is not huge.

It's a really fun way to spend an hour, and we'll show you a good time here at the Shaker Gallery.

And you can find out a lot more about salt and pepper shakers than you ever wanted to know.

♪♪ ♪♪ Kohlsdorf: The Iowa Valley Scenic Byway traces a stretch of the Iowa River known as the Iowa River Corridor.

Part of the Mississippi River watershed, the corridor is home to a wide variety of birds and wildlife, and includes habitats such as wetland, grassland, forest, and savannah.

Ellingson: The Iowa River Corridor is a public expanse of land that runs Tama, Benton, and Iowa Counties.

It's 15 to 16,000 acres, end to end, and it was incepted after the '93 flooding.

A lot of the valley floods here pretty frequently.

And after a number of floods, the federal government finally came in and offered any interested land owners that farmed in the valley the opportunity to buy their land out and kind of rescue them from that flooding.

The U.S.

Fish and Wildlife Service owns most of it.

There is some state ownership and some county ownership.

Kohlsdorf: At Otter Creek Marsh outside the town of Chelsea, Iowa's Department of Natural Resources is focused on fostering wildlife habitat, providing an excellent location for fishing, paddling, bird watching, and hiking.

So, Otter Creek Marsh is right behind us here.

That's about 3,600 to 3,800 acres of wildlife area, and it's got a couple of different types of habitat on it.

One of them is a manmade marsh system that's about 1,200 of those acres, and we can manage those.

We're trying to grow a lot of annual weeds, moist soil-type plants that produce hard seeds, and those are beneficial for migrating water fowl.

Once we get that vegetation grown, August and September, we'll start refilling our marsh with water, and we'll bring that up slowly, and we'll start to time that with some of our migration.

As our birds start to come back this fall, we'll have available habitat out there, which is critical for them during their migrations.

This was the first place in Iowa that sandhill cranes were ever documented to have re-nested after they were extirpated back many, many years ago.

So, we've had a nesting population of cranes here since '92, and that's growing and growing.

We've got trumpeter swans out there.

I think this year, we have at least four successful pairs with 15 or so cygnets between those four pairs, so that's pretty exciting.

We're standing on an observation deck here on Otter Creek Marsh, and it's in the shape of a flying bald eagle.

We constructed this thing a number of years ago, and it does get a fair amount of use.

There's actually an active bald eagle nest out in there.

So, when we built it, we kind of had it pointing that way.

Whether you're hunting or whether you're out here just to enjoy wildlife, view wildlife, go for a walk with your binoculars, that kind of thing, there's a lot of opportunities out here to experience wildlife in whatever capacity you're interested.

♪♪ Kohlsdorf: Before Tama was a county and Iowa was a state, the Meskwaki people of the Sac and Fox Tribe of the Mississippi and Iowa settled in the Iowa River Valley.

The tribe formally purchased land near Tama in 1857 and governs itself still today.

Pull off the byway at the Meskwaki Cultural Center and Museum to learn the history of the Sac and Fox tribe.

If you're passing through in August, be sure to attend the annual Meskwaki pow-wow for a grand display of traditional Sac and Fox dress and ceremony.

On Highway 30, behind the Meskwaki Casino, sits Red Earth Gardens, where Waylon Wolf and his team are hard at work growing fresh fruits and vegetables for their community.

Wolf: Red Earth Gardens started in 2013 as part of the Meskwaki Food Sovereignty Initiative.

You know, they wanted to bring in more healthy foods for our community.

You know, they wanted to go with our old traditional ways of growing all natural, you know, some call it organic.

We also use it as a community get-together, like, everybody to gather, make a big meal, bring everybody together.

Behind us, we have three fields of melons and squash mixed together.

Six different varieties of beans.

Behind you, we got garlic and potatoes.

And in the distance there, we got some sweet corn.

Right here, we got jalapeños.

We got three different varieties of bell peppers.

On the trellis here, we have two rows of snap peas and two rows of Fortex green beans.

Kohlsdorf: Wolf took over the garden in 2022, after 16 years working in the Meskwaki Bingo Casino Hotel.

Wolf: It is hard work.

We don't mind the heat.

We don't mind the sun, but trying to keep up with the weeds, trying to keep up with when things grow, when to harvest it, you know, not relying on the rain.

My personal goals are to actually get people here.

I want volunteers here.

You know, I want to see them from seed to finish.

You know, I want people out here getting healthy, getting some sun, show them how we grow it, you know, so they can take it home and start their own gardens.

You know, the name Red Earth Gardens came from the word Meskwaki, the red earth people.

We're a pretty close-knit community, and you know, we take care of Mother Earth, and she takes care of us.

You know, I mean, that's pretty much how it works.

Kohlsdorf: North of the byway in Clutier sits a modest shelter which was never intended to attract visitors.

Clutier's Old Town Jail dates back to 1901.

In 1914, it was burned by a detainee locked inside.

The town rebuilt and used this two-room cooler until the late 1950s.

Step inside the joint for a rare photo opportunity and celebrate the fact that you're just visiting.

If you're a road tripper who likes the scenic route, head to eastern Tama County for the Iowa Czech trail.

Stretching from Clutier to Chelsea, these rolling hills are known locally as the Bohemian Alps.

♪♪ Horton: The Bohemian group of Czechoslovakians that settled here in this area, they liked it better than the flat ground, which is a lot better yielding as far as corn, beans, etc.

But they loved the hills because it reminded them of the foothill of the Bohemian Alps.

Well, one of the reasons is they had timber in it, and they like to burn -- they wanted to burn wood.

And it was similar to the background where they came from.

I want to take credit for calling at the Bohemian Alps.

I think I might have, but I can't be sure.

But I know their grandson took the cooking in the Bohemian Alps, and he thought that up.

♪♪ Rouse: Well, I can tell you as a transplant, most of the names are not familiar to us and sometimes hard to say.

Ron Brea.

Richard Hushek.

I'm Phillis Hushek.

I'm Bev Veseli, and Veseli means happy.

I married a Veseli, and the Veselis have deep roots here.

Plus the Pastocas.

They both ran general stores here.

My great-grandfather Pastoca was a postmaster.

The lodge was very important.

Especially Memorial Day was a very big celebration here.

They had their lodge meetings, and they had secret passwords to get in and people come from Czech, and they sat in this area and their families came and their friends came, and they just all settled around.

Breja: I was born at Clutier.

My grandparents would have come from Czechoslovakia or out that way.

My grandparents came from the old country, too, all of them.

Bazal: They just call it the Bohemian Alps because the Bohemis, or Czechs, settled here, and we have so many hills and stuff around here that they just -- it's the Bohemian Alps.

You're born into it.

♪♪ Kohlsdorf: Southeast of the Czech Trail, near the small town of Belle Plaine, the Iowa Valley Scenic Byway overlaps with the historic Lincoln Highway.

For nearly a century, locals, motorists, and cross-country travelers have stopped for three square meals and even an overnight snack at the Lincoln Cafe.

[ Train whistle blows ] ♪♪ What can I start you off with to drink?

Well, I'm 67 years old, and I used to come in high school.

♪♪ A lot of the customers that come here are from out of town because it's a destination place.

Everyone doing okay?

Oh, yes.

Man: For special occasions, for birthday dinners, things like that -- a lot of those would happen here.

It's just an awfully good place to eat, I think.

It was good back -- yeah, back then.

It's really nice now, though.

It's a good family restaurant.

♪♪ ♪♪ Kohlsdorf: The Lincoln Cafe has served generations of loyal diners since it first opened in 1928.

For decades, this small eatery counted out-of-towners as regulars, thanks to the legendary transcontinental Lincoln Highway, which runs right beside the building.

[ Train whistle blows ] Belle Plaine's status as a railroad hub also meant that steam-engine crews came through the cafe doors at all hours of the night for a hot cup of coffee and a warm meal.

Do we want any more coffee?

Owners Jimmy and Kristy Limani purchased the cafe in 2010 after it had sat closed for a period of time.

They immediately set about putting new life into this classic diner.

We were in Tama for about nine years, a little bit over nine years, and we had a lot of customers from Belle Plaine.

So after the Highway 30 switched and the business kind of went down a little bit, and, you know, we took it over.

It was closed for about two years, so we had to do a lot of renovation.

Who has the chocolate cake?

Ooh, thank you.

Kristy: I believe it was established in another location, and then it moved here in the late 1920s.

It's just had several owners over -- over the years.

So it's definitely been a main staple of Belle Plaine.

They were really happy.

They wanted this place going, just like it was before.

♪♪ Man #2: I've been coming probably since I was born.

I remember coming up after church, coming up, eating all-you-can eat chicken and potatoes and coleslaw and everything.

My favorite dish is all-you-can-eat walleye.

Oh, gosh, I eat a hamburger and fries.

Tenderloin's always good.

Usually, I get a skillet if we come in the morning, but I switched things up today.

Hamburger and fries.

[ Chuckles ] My favorite meal here is probably the beer battered chicken strips.

Kristy: We are definitely known for our beer battered chicken strips.

That's probably one of the number-one things.

Our fresh fruit plates -- when the weather starts to get warm, we have people calling, "Do you have your fresh fruit plates yet, or when are you guys gonna bring those back?"

So, people really look forward to a lot of our different specials.

[ Laughs ] Kohlsdorf: Hungry commuters have stopped in Belle Plaine to enjoy the hospitality at the Lincoln Cafe for almost 100 years.

A lot of people come up to just associate and talk.

It's been here for years.

Yeah.

And it's always gonna be here, I hope.

♪♪ Kohlsdorf: At its eastern end, the Iowa Valley Scenic Byway is anchored in the Amana Colonies, seven villages of living history, which tell the tale of a communal society of German immigrants.

Members of a Christian order called the Community of True Inspiration arrived in Iowa in 1855, seeking religious freedom and fertile land.

From Scripture, they chose the name "Amana," which means "remain true."

For almost 80 years, the Amana Colonies were an interdependent society, where property was shared, no one earned a wage, and the community provided for everyone's needs.

I'm here at the High Amana General Store, which has been around since 1857.

Today, it serves as both a gift shop selling artisan goods, and also a history museum.

Let's take a look inside.

♪♪ ♪♪ We are here with Kathie, and I'm just kind of in awe right now by the store.

It looks like we're walking back in time.

Is most of this original?

Absolutely.

Nothing has been changed in the store.

Everything's original from ceiling to floor.

The tin ceiling was unique because it came in 6-foot rolls and not the tiles that we're used to.

Counters and display cases are also original.

We've just turned them so you can go behind the counters all the way around the store.

We're doing it for our locally handcrafted products, but we also import our German Christmas decorations, and they come from a little village in Germany.

We have the little guys up here in front, and we keep the bigger ones in the back.

So we're walking back in time.

Take us back to the time when a lot of the Germans who were coming to the United States because of religious freedom -- tell us about the community that they helped create here in Amana.

Well, it was a communal organization, and it was, like I like to say, the Three Musketeers.

It was all for one and one for all.

They had communal kitchens.

They did not have kitchens in their homes.

I think High Amana had nine kitchens to serve because they could do 30 to 40 people, and they ate five times a day.

How is that way of living still present here in Amana today?

Well, we're proud of our area.

It's very scenic and serene, very quiet here, and our flowers and our garden still look [chuckling] very nice.

Church, of course, is something that we do together, and it's still done the old way.

We would be compared to a German Lutheran, but we're not.

Our religion is called the Community of True Inspiration.

Kathie, thanks so much for the history lesson.

Well, you're welcome.

Let's go see more of the Amana Colonies.

♪♪ Kohlsdorf: Today, the Amana Colonies are a National Historic Landmark, proudly displaying their brick and stone structures, charming lanterns, and colorful flower beds.

Hundreds of thousands of visitors travel to this part of Iowa each year to get a taste of a different way of life.

We bought in '07, and we brought in all Momma Joyce's recipes that we played with a little bit and made into large-batch recipes.

We call ourselves a grandma bakery.

We want everyone to feel like they're coming into Grandma's house, right at home.

Momma Joyce: The molasses cookies started in the 1800s with my great-grandmother.

And then just our recent -- took 12 years to develop -- is our new multigrain.

Thank you so much.

You have a great day.

-Thank you.

-Thank you.

Lockhart: We are at the Amana Meat Market.

It's been here since 1855.

Every village used to have their own butcher shop.

We're still in operation.

We have most of the meat brought in now, and then we just go ahead and use all the old-time recipes.

Kohlsdorf: As the communal society dissipated in the 1930s, the Amana community celebrated their heritage by sharing it with others.

Preserving the past while moving forward can be tricky, but the Amana Colonies have threaded the needle.

Dietrich: We're in the historic Amana Woolen Mill.

This woolen mill has been here for over 150 years.

The people who ran this came from Germany.

The Amana people brought with them many of the arts and crafts and trades that they learned in Germany, and one of them was weaving.

They originally raised sheep right here on the farm, and they sheared the wool off of the sheep.

They dried it, they dyed it, and they spun it into yarn.

Today, farmland is too valuable to raise sheep on.

So we buy our yarn already manufactured, and it goes to the warping and the weaving process.

And right now we are in front of the warping creel, which is the lengthwise threads on the blanket.

Kohlsdorf: How many blankets and other pieces do you make in a year?

We make about 5,000 blankets a year.

We're much more mechanized than we were back in the 1850s.

We can weave a blanket in about 3 minutes on computerized loom.

Why is it so important to keep a place like this alive?

I think it's very important.

I think keeping the history alive for the next generation...

They kept it alive for us.

We have multigenerational employees here, and to keep that alive -- so much of weaving has gone overseas.

Two or three woolen mills left in the United States.

There are a few cotton mills in the South.

But we are one of the few.

We are the only one left in the state of Iowa.

You know if you buy an Amana blanket, it's made right here.

So, Amy, this is the final step, correct?

Amy: It is.

This is where we put the Amana label on.

What's so significant about this label?

Part of it is that it has the logo, the Tree of Life logo, which all the Amana businesses have.

And it sort of, I think, you know, pulls together all the businesses and all the people who work here in the same way that they -- people were together when they first came.

It doesn't even seem like a blanket until this label goes on.

With its lush rural landscape and rich cultural heritage, the Iowa Valley Scenic Byway allows visitors to experience a different way of life, if only for a day.

We shook things up at the Salt and Pepper Shaker Gallery, learned about the Sac and Fox Tribe on the Meskwaki settlement, discovered strong immigrant roots along Iowa's Czech Trail, and experienced the enduring pride and heritage of the Amana Colonies.

We hope you learned something new about the Iowa Valley Scenic Byway and feel inspired to hit the road and chart your own course through our state.

For more of the history, culture, and landscape along Iowa's Scenic byways, join us next time on "Road Trip Iowa."

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Woman: Kwik Star is proud to be a part of Iowa communities across the state.

Family owned for over 50 years, we’re dedicated to treating our guests, employees, and communities as we would like to be treated.

Man: Musco Lighting is an Iowa company that travels across the U.S. and to more than 125 countries to light community recreation fields, stadiums, airports, monuments, and more.

While our reach is global, we’re committed to our local communities.