950. Orange City, Sioux County (IA08)

Is this courthouse made of catlinite? Because it looks a lot like Pipestone County to me. My immediate thought on arrival was that we were returning to a more midwestern style of courthouses because somehow I managed to blank Madison and Ada out of my head despite seeing them literally hours before. But I also started thinking about who the architects might have been. Was there a small batch of firms coming out with similar outcomes? Or possibly one ascendant firm doing them all? Further research determined that not only were there many firms involved from different places, but also that I still have trouble telling the difference between Beaux Arts and Romanesque Revival, specifically the Richardsonian version thereof. I might feel bad about that if I made any pretense to knowing anything about architecture.

Turned out that the reason that the place was called Orange City is because it was founded by my most disliked people, the Dutch! Ok, maybe not. I’m just kidding about that. I usually use to Dutch as a fake and comical focal point of hatred. It’s not good to hate an entire people in the first place, but who hates the Dutch? Except certain parts of Southeast Asia and South Africa? And maybe the late 19th Century English for geopolitical reasons? Regardless, it did explain something I didn’t immediately pick up on, that so many caches around the county had Dutch names. Once I got to town, I had to find one at the local Dutch park!

The cache was clever enough, contained inside a capped pipe hidden with some other piping on the side of a building onsite. It probably would have taken me a bit if I hadn’t run into a similar one up in Quebec. I also wondered if I wanted to do something similar back home… Inveni, inscripsi, reposui. And then, after fueling up the car, I was moving again, bound for…