Special Projects

The Iowa River Corridor Project . The Center for Prairie Studies is one of the principal collaborators in The Iowa River Corridor Project. The project seeks to foster a regional consciousness and identity among residents of the Iowa River Corridor between Iowa City and Tama/Toledo for the purpose of sparking cooperation in economic and cultural development among the region’s residents.

Other project partners are the Iowa Valley Resource Conservation and Development (RC&D) and Free River Press. The Iowa Valley RC&D is a non-profit corporation whose objectives are to enhance resources in, and improve the quality of life for the people of, Poweshiek, Tama, Benton, Iowa, Linn, and Johnson counties. Free River Press is a non-profit education corporation, which for the last twelve years has run writing workshops for people without literary ambition and has published 17 volumes of this work. A collection of Free River Press writings, An American Mosaic, was published in 1999 by Oxford University Press.

In 2006, the Iowa River Corridor Project published The Iowa River Corridor Book, a tabloid-size book about the corridor written by area residents -- high school students, college students, and adults. Both the project and the book are modeled on a similar cultural and economic assessment of four counties in northeast Iowa done in 1997. The Northeast Iowa Book and The Iowa River Corridor Book are first-of-a-kind regional surveys, both of them conceived and implemented by Free River Press publisher and editor Robert Wolf.

The Iowa River Corridor Book consists of three sections. The first section is a photo essay on the corridor, taken by students and adults. Its purpose is to convey, visually, a common sense of place.

The second section consists of essays and stories on the region’s ecology and history, including Native American cultures, early pioneer settlement, agriculture, industry, transportation, government, religion, and education. Many of the essays were written by Grinnell College students and faculty members. Others were prepared by adults and high school students under the guidance of high school teachers and the project’s directing scholar, Robert Wolf.

The third section of the book is a Survey of Community Assets and Needs, or SCAN, a common tool among economic developers. The function of a SCAN is to identify what assets a community or region has in the major functions of its economy and culture, and to suggest where greater development could and should occur.

Copies of the book are available at no charge to cities, high schools, colleges, chambers of commerce, and citizens in the corridor.

Poweshiek Skipperling Reintroduction. The Poweshiek skipper, Oarisma poweshiek (Parker 1870) is a small butterfly that was discovered in Grinnell, Iowa and named after the county in which it was found. Volunteers have looked for this butterfly for two years in a row. Read more about this project in the Fall Newsletter.

How to Identify the Poweshiek Skipper

Survey Instructions