Iowa History 101 mobile museum to visit Postville July 27 ...

The Iowa History 101 mobile museum coordinated by the State Historical Society of Iowa will be visiting Postville Thursday, July 27. The Winnebago recreational vehicle (RV), pictured above, filled with Iowa’s history will be at the Postville Farmers Market, which is held weekly at 101 East Greene Street, from 4-7 p.m. that Thursday for its only scheduled visit to Allamakee County in an effort to visit all 99 Iowa counties again from 2021-2023. The mobile museum will be parked in front of the Northeast Iowa Resource Conservation and Development (RC&D) office in Postville.

The exhibition is housed in a bright blue, custom-built Winnebago RV and is filled with artifacts and other memorabilia, including such items as a Meskwaki cradleboard from the late 1800s, a frame used in combination with a beaded wrap to protect infants; knitting needles used by Jane Kirkwood of Iowa City to aid soldiers during the Civil War and World War I; a birchbark lunchbox used by a boy in Cerro Gordo County in the 1870s; women’s suffrage materials including the pen Governor William Harding of Sibley used to sign Iowa’s 19th Amendment bill, as part of the national effort to ensure women’s right to vote; a University of Iowa pennant owned by Edward Carter of Monroe County, the first African American to get a medical degree from the University of Iowa; a business card from the 1920s of J.L. Spriggs, an African-American homebuilder in Des Moines; boots worn by Des Moines Water Works Director L.D. McMullen during the historic flood of 1993; a NASA-issued flight suit worn by record-breaking astronaut Peggy Whitson of Beaconsfield; photographs of Iowans from across the state; and much more. Submitted photo.