The Million Dollar Corner

The Million Dollar Corner

There's no sign up anywhere, near or far, but every last soul in the region knows the intersection of the two major two-lane-ers in the county--highways 75 and 10--is, was, and has been for as long as anyone can remember, the "Million Dollar Corner." It's lays out there on a low plain all by its lonesome, closest burg is Maurice, three miles south. It's an ordinary, but busy northwest Iowa intersection. Once upon a time a gas station tried to make a go of it on the southeast corner, but successive floods likely dampened enthusiasm for people trying to turn a buck there, no matter that Million Dollar Corner handles as much traffic as any corner in the county. 

The nickname, if you listen closely, has a sneer to it, as if some local despised government spending and assessed the whole corner to be a lousy "boondoggle," even though that long quarter-mile bridge, north and south, was paid for by the Great Northern, not Washington big spenders. 

Years ago, a man named Harold Aardema, of the Doon Press, told me the corner was called that because a tragedy, death by drowning, took place there and would never be forgotten, a father and son swept away in a flood where there shouldn't have been one, right there at the corner, where the only source of water is a creek that barely whispers most of the year, the West Branch of the Floyd River, of Sargent Floyd fame.  

On Saturday, September 27, 1926, Deputy Auditor M. J. Van Wyk reported the official rainfall at Hull, Iowa, to be 14 inches. Boyden's Supervisor Kamminga claimed a barrel, empty before the storm, had two-feet of water in it when the rains finally quit. 

Somewhere near Lebanon, a harried one-room school teacher kept the kids inside while around the building water rose into a roiling horror. All night she held out, while the kids' folks kept everything lit at a nearby farm place where the whole lot of them waited prayerfully for their children's deliverance. One young man, a boy of DeVries, gallant as anything, was lost, his wagon swept away when he tried to get out to the school. Like the teacher, "little Miss Mouw," the boy of DeVries was 18 years old.

But the story old Aardema told was of a father and son, a man named Terpstra, from Hospers, on his way to Sioux Center. Any local will tell you that his routing decision makes no sense, then or now. Hospers is a pure straight-edge east from Sioux Center, but Terpstra and his son had to angle far out of the way to avoid the flood waters that eventually took both dad and his boy. 

Terpstra was the jeweler in Hospers, well-known, a businessman, on his way to pick up his wife from all day Sioux Center church doings, a missions gala. He'd turned north just a bit from Million Dollar Corner, when his tires went down into an invisible washout created by rushing water. He and his son, just seven years old, climbed out of the car, even got to the roof, which made the tragedy public. People on the banks of the raging West Branch saw it happen. The bodies weren't found until they showed up a couple days later, mud-laden, downstream.

But newspaper accounts back then locate the sadness right there at "Million Dollar Corner," which means that intersection had its widely held nickname already then, in 1926, almost a century ago.

Then why am I retelling that whole sad story? Why not just let those tears evaporate into the miasma of a foggy ancient past? Maybe because I'd like to think that a million dollars worth of bridge-building and some heavy-duty dirt work all around the intersection was no boondoggle, wasn't wasted taxes at all, wasn't wasted anything.

Today, there's a gigantic crane over the north end of that long railroad bridge. You can't miss it. Some kind of repair is going on, if for no other reason than to keep the BNSF freights that pass the intersection from some messy derailment.

Besides, I shouldn't have to tell the descendants of all those Dutch folks that cleanliness is next to Godliness, that order is better than chaos, that being ready for some torrential downpour is better than simply letting it happen again.

I like old Aardema's suggestion--that the place is named after construction that went on after that deadly flood, even though historically it's not true. I like the idea of remembering because Mark Twain got it right long ago: "The past does not repeat itself, but it rhymes."

Every time I come over the hill just east of Million Dollar Corner, I honestly don't mind being reminded that once upon a time. . .well, you know.