Only Fermanagh Press Only in Iowa: Strange But True Tales from the Hawkeye State Paperback

Only in Iowa: Strange But True Tales from the Hawkeye StateIowa is supposed to be the ordinary one. Corn, quiet towns, a state people fly over. It isn't, and it never was.This is the state where a small town in the northwest corner recorded a cold so severe it still stands in the record books more than a century later. Where rye whiskey ran out of a quiet farming community during Prohibition and straight into Chicago speakeasies, protected by neighbors who never said a word. Where entire towns once had post offices, newspapers, ball games, and Saturday nights - and then simply stopped existing, leaving nothing but a cemetery and a name on an old plat map.Only in Iowa gathers 273 true stories from across the state, arranged into fifteen themed sections: ghost towns and vanished settlements, outlaws and unsolved crimes, bizarre laws still technically on the books, forgotten inventions and the Iowans behind them, disasters and near-misses, oddities of geography and weather, early Native history, small-town sports legends, and the ordinary people whose lives turned out stranger than any fiction.Every entry is short enough to read in a minute and researched carefully enough to repeat with confidence. Sources are cited throughout - county histories, period newspapers, archival records, and firsthand accounts. There is no recycled internet folklore here, no tall tale passed off as documented history. Where the record is uncertain or contested, the book says so plainly and tells you what is actually known.The result is a book that works three ways. Open it anywhere and read a single entry while the coffee brews. Read a full section and come away understanding something real about how a place gets settled, prospers, and sometimes disappears. Or hand it to someone who has lived in Iowa their whole life and watch them discover that the town twenty minutes down the highway has a history they never heard.Organized for browsing rather than straight-through reading, with clear section headings and short entries suited to readers who prefer to dip in and out.For lifelong Iowans who think they already know their state. For transplants trying to make sense of it. For anyone who has driven past a roadside historical marker at sixty miles an hour and wondered what actually happened there. And for readers of local history, Americana, roadside oddities, and regional trivia who want their strange stories properly sourced.A gift for the Iowa native who has everything, a browsing book for everyone else, and a reference that holds up when someone asks whether it's really true.Written by Nora Bramwell and published by Fermanagh Press.