Correctionville

[Abby Brown] If you're in the town of Correctionville, Iowa, this sign has a far deeper meaning than you can imagine.

(A yellow diamond-shaped road sign with an arrow that points up, to the right, then up again.)

(Two street signs at a crossroads. The one on the top reads “5th street” the one on the bottom reads “Driftwood street.”)

(Map marking Woodbury County in northwestern Iowa.)

The town of Correctionville kind of sounds like it has a correctional facility, like a prison, but nope, there's no prison here. Instead, Correctionville corrects the difference between a round planet Earth, evenly divided land areas, and straight roads to get people from one place to another.

The Land Ordinance of 1785 helped define how undeveloped land would be divided and sold. Thomas Jefferson proposed a grid system that would evenly split the land into one square mile plots.

Each one of the plots would have 640 acres.

Since the Earth is round, lines running north and south would eventually meet. So in order to keep the lines straight, a correction had to be made every 24 miles.

In Iowa, there are two correction lines. One that goes from Scott County to Harrison County and another that runs from Dubuque to Sioux City.

If you look at a satellite map along those statewide correction lines, you'll see several places where the north-south roads don't line up. So they zig zag a little.

One of those crooked roads is right here in Correctionville on 5th Street when the street has to jog just a little bit to get the grid back on track — or to correct it.

Fascinating, right?

Every county in Iowa has a map to its past. In Woodbury County, that map has a little bend in the road that tells an interesting tale about its historic and scientific roots.

Funding for FIND Iowa has been provided by The Coons Foundation, Pella and the Gilchrist Foundation.