686. Glenwood, Mills County (IA02)

Getting here was a complete and total pain. I managed to get stuck behind the same two trucks and a car for about 150 miles. I just could not get around or away from them until I was almost in town. And how were my travails repaid? With a new courthouse? I mean, I guess it’s not terrible, but it’s not good either. I didn’t see any sort of cornerstone that would identify when it was built, but if I had to put money on it, I would have to guess the 1960s. This could be a pretty forward-looking building from the 1950s, but I seriously doubted it at the time. Further research has confirmed that it was built in 1958-9, so I may have lost a few bucks, but I would claim a spiritual victory. Otherwise, it was sitting in the center of a very normal Midwestern square.

I also found it strange that it had a clock tower on the side but no flagpole. What’s up with that? As an even weirder sidenote to that, I realized something I hadn’t noticed before. Thinking about the flagpole, I saw that several businesses and a few homes were flying flags, but somehow, I didn’t recognize them as the Iowa flag. I immediately thought they were some kind of variant Mexican flag or early Texas flag. I apologize to all Iowans for failing you in a vexillological sense.

The cache was once a regular cache that has since become a micro. I can’t blame people for replacing bigger ones with smaller ones as time goes by (long periods especially), but it would have been nice if someone had mentioned it in a log or something. I probably would have gone for a completely different cache if I had known. That said, it was close to the courthouse and on my way out of town, so I might have gotten this one anyway. I didn’t exactly check the logs before getting here either, so technically, I guess nobody else is at fault. It was good enough, and helped speed me on my way to…