[Charity Nebbe] 

Coming up on this episode of Iowa Life, we'll explore Iowa's natural legacy in Okoboji.

Our focus over the next two weeks is to try to detect nesting females and find where they're laying their eggs so we can then monitor those into the fall.

[Nebbe] 

We'll see how community support kept Gowrie's grocery store from becoming town history.

We were very clear that that was not necessarily going to be a money-making situation. It was to keep the business that we have open.

[Nebbe] 

And we'll experience the tactile work of Des Moines artist Jill Wells.

If I don't have access to art and someone else doesn't have access to it and I as one single person feel like I could change that, I do believe it's my responsibility to do that.

[Nebbe] 

It's all coming up next on Iowa Life.

[Announcer] 

Funding for Iowa Life is provided by the Lainie Grimm Fund for Inclusive Programming at the Iowa PBS Foundation and by Friends, the Iowa PBS Foundation.

(music)

[Nebbe] 

I'm Charity Nebbe, and this is Iowa Life. Today we are on the shore of Lake Macbride, named for Thomas Macbride, a biologist and a naturalist and the 10th president of the University of Iowa. Macbride was passionate about getting his students out into nature, inspiring them to experience the natural wonders of Iowa firsthand. He led many groups westward from Iowa City and eventually founded Iowa Lakeside Laboratory on the shore of Lake Okoboji. In our next story, we're going to go to Lakeside Lab and find out how today's scientists and students are carrying on his legacy.

(music)

[Mary Skopec] 

Iowa Lakeside Laboratory is an Iowa Board of Regents field biological campus purchased in 1909 by Thomas Macbride. Was just a few acres to start with, right on the shoreline of West Okoboji, for the study of nature in nature. When students first came here in 1909, they stayed in canvas tents. They grew their own vegetables, they fetched their own water, and they really were completely outside all of the time.

 

In the late 20s, they gifted the property to the state of Iowa under the understanding that it would always maintain the same mission and purpose. Over time, the Civilian Conservation Corps has built laboratories, and so the stone labs provided that shelter for students to do experiments and kind of get out of the elements.

And those are all on the National Historic Registry. Lakeside's considered a National Historic District, so the entire grounds are considered historic. I think of us as the crossroads between state park, museum and educational facility. Over time we've added 147 acres. The campus basically wraps around little Millers Bay of West Okoboji. And that allows us to have everything from native prairie, restored prairie to woodlands, to wetland areas, the shoreline, the lake itself.

(music)
   

Drew Howing is a professor at Iowa Lakes Community College, and he's been working on a research project looking at Blanding's turtle, which are an endangered or threatened species of turtle in Iowa.

[Drew Howing] 

Our main priority and goal is to try to catch and learn more about the Blanding's turtles that are living at this site. If you want to just walk out to that hill and just listen to see if maybe she's moved into this creek. They travel a lot more over land and walk further away from their aquatic habitat to nest, laying their eggs in corn and soybean fields.

We're trying to monitor those with telemetered animals to get an idea on the success of those nests. They both found in the wetland?

[Man] 

Yeah, both in the wetland. 133 seem to be right over there.

[Howing] 

Our focus over the next two weeks is to try to detect nesting females and find where they're laying their eggs so we can then monitor those into the fall. You can take your fingers right here, and I can feel she's chock full of eggs. She's just fitted with a radio here that is used with an epoxy put on the back of her shell.

She's at least 14.

[Katherine Shepherd] 

When I got here, I didn't know how to conduct a lot of field research, and I didn't know the different protocols of different types of field research. It was really interesting to be in the marsh and picking up the turtles as we went –

-- like 3.75 – 

-- checking in on them and just learning more about them as we had them in our hands.

[Man] 

There I just heard it. I'm hearing it. This is mine.

[Shepherd] 

We all are able to work together even though we don't always know what's going on. We're kind of figuring out how to do field research as a team. I'll be better at problem solving when I'm doing my own research in the future. Being out in the field really connected me to the project.

[Howing] 

But I swear I felt eggs in there.

[Man] 

I think she does.

[Howing] 

We're gonna want to just check on her while we're checking on 083 down here.

[Man] 

Awesome.

(music)

[John Doershuk] 

We're at the Abbie Gardner Historic Site in Dickinson County, Iowa, on the shores of West Okoboji Lake. We're here today because I'm teaching in archaeological field school for four weeks at Iowa Lakeside Laboratory.

(music)

One of the objectives of the archaeological field school is to give the students experience, training and methods. What they actually discover is not necessarily as important as just getting the experience of how to identify things in the field, record the data so it's useful for subsequent use by other researchers and help build the archaeological knowledge base.

(music)

[Doershuk]

What are you getting?

[Girl] 

Piece of bone.

[Doershuk] 

One thing I like about doing an archaeological field school at Iowa Lakeside Lab is the opportunity to interact with lots of other scientists, interns, and students all coming here to really nerd out on their own science. And it's a time when we can just relax and science first and all other concerns second.

I feel it's a place where I can share my expertise with students who are interested in the field, more interested in just being willing to show up in the classroom or on an online zoom, but to actually make the commitment to be here and do the hard work that's involved in field archaeology.

[Avery Domino] 

They're hot days, they're long days, but it's very rewarding work. The point, of course, is the process and not actually finding things, but having the moment where you're like, oh my gosh, I've just found another nail or a button or a chert flake. Truly, time flies. We'll show up here early in the morning and then all of a sudden Dr. Doershuk is saying, hey, it's time to go to lunch.

(music)

[Skopec] 

I think that the students are really completing who they are as people here. We get them out of the classroom, into the field so that they really understand what a professional will be doing. And it just helps them put all the pieces together. One of the things our students are doing are asking questions about how to protect these resources long term.

Their research is very focused and practical to the questions that people ask me every single day. Are the lakes getting better? What's going to happen in the future? And we're able to answer those questions with our students in a really practical way that helps people here make better decisions. I think we're all richer by having an educational facility that's focused on Iowa questions and on the Iowa environment.

(music)

(music)

[Nebbe] 

History often leaves us with more questions than answers, especially when we look closely at difficult chapters from our past. On the shore of West Okoboji Lake, at the Abbie Gardner Sharp Cabin, students uncover traces of daily life while also confronting a much deeper story. In March of 1857, this place became the center of what is known as the Spirit Lake Massacre, a tragic moment in Iowa's history.

[Kevin Mason] 

It's not a simple story. This is the story of American settlement in a way that I think is important for us to remember and try to understand better.

[Nebbe] 

The Spirit Lake Massacre was more than a single violent event. It was part of the sweeping transformation of the American frontier. Inkpaduta was the leader of the Wapekuta Dakota, a group whose life centered on summering at Spirit Lake and wintering near the confluence of the Little Sioux and Missouri rivers.

[Mason] 

And as Inkpaduta grows up, he sees this incredible change come to the lands the Dakota have been living in for hundreds, if not thousands of years. We're talking about complete conversion of prairies. Iowa's going to lose 99% of its prairie lands. We're going to lose almost all of our wetlands.

[Nebbe] 

This loss will forever change the Dakota way of life.

[Mason] 

So, the most simple way to think about kind of the timeline of events with Spirit Lake in 1857 is Inkpaduta is going to bring his Tayogaspe, or band, down to Smithland, which is in modern day Woodbury County. Over the summer of 1856, we're going to see new groups of people move into Smithland, and they are going to be trying to scratch out a life for themselves that's going to come into competition for land and natural resources with the Dakota.

And the Dakota had been coming to Smithland as far as the Western record goes back. There's a farmer there named Curtis Lamb who, once he makes his claim, the Dakota come and stay on his land.

[Nebbe] 

A series of misfortunes set the stage for what was to come. In the summer of 1856, Curtis Lamb sold his land and moved to Sioux City. The farmer who bought it was not hospitable to the Dakota. That fall, a prairie fire burned through hay fields needed to feed the settlers livestock. And then came the winter of 1856-1857, the harshest in Iowa's history, bringing months of cold, snow and hardship.

[Mason] 

The settlers of Smithland are really struggling. They're already desperate before the Dakota even arrive. They form a militia and they confront the Dakota. They tell them, we're going to disarm you and you're going to leave. The Dakota are going to flee up the Little Sioux River heading towards Spirit Lake. It's a place Inkpaduta had often been during the summer.

When he had last been through the Great Lakes, there was no settlers there. As they head up the Little Sioux River, things go from bad to worse. One of Inkpaduta's grandchildren starves to death. They break into some cabins. They have some conflicts with some different settlers as they're moving up the river.

[Nebbe] 

When Inkpaduta and his band reached Spirit Lake, they encountered the settlement where several families had built cabins. Abbie Gardner Sharp's memoir describes how the Dakota attacked the settlement.

[Mason] 

She talks about her mother, feeds the Dakota in the morning, they come back in the afternoon. Then her dad turns around and Inkpaduta allegedly shoots Roland Gardner in the back. We do know that Abbie is taken captive, that Dakota kill the rest of her family in front of her, including her parents, her infant brother, and then they move through the lakes all the way up to Jackson, Minnesota, actively trying to destroy the settlement there.

Over 36 people are going to lose their lives as this happens. Four women are going to be taken captive, two of which later also die as the Dakota flee west. Sometimes I think about it as like the last gasp of the frontier in that Inkpaduta is going to strike back against this settlement, of course, but in a way that's going to force him to flee west and stay west for the rest of his life.

And we get into this really difficult historical reckoning where we have Abbie's story, we have the Dakota stories. And I always am trying to challenge people to think about, like, well, what would you do to preserve your home, your way of life, and then what would it take before we start to see this violence?

And I think, like, if we continue to avoid the difficult things in our past and we try to gloss over them and not look hard at complex things, then we lose a part of who we are, and we certainly lose the potential of who we can become by confronting those things.

(music)

[Nebbe] 

Gowrie is a town of 900. Over 40% of grocery stores in Iowa towns this size have closed, but Market on Market has stayed open, thanks to some creative thinking and the people who support it.

(music)

[Nebbe] 

In Gowrie, for more than 30 years, farmers, lawyers, bankers and more have been 

meeting every morning to have coffee and play a simple game.

[Allan Wicklein] 

We call it the numbers game. And I have a notebook here and I write down a number, since I run the show. The numbers determine how many people actually show up. So, if there's six of us, I pick a number between 1 and 6, 600. And we start from the previous day. Whoever got stuck the previous day, we start with them.

[Man] 

666.

[Wicklein] 

666. And then we go around.

[Man]

781.

[Wicklein] 

The numbers keep getting narrower and narrower, and then somebody will pick the number I picked and they get stuck. 

Oh, no.

Yeah.

[Wicklein] 

799. Thank you. Burger. When you get stuck, you can give me the money and everybody's coffee. If there's 12 of us, you have to pay $12.

[Nebbe] 

While this long-standing tradition may have thinned local pocketbooks –

[Man] 

Here it is. $12.

[Nebbe] 

-- the winners have fortified community institutions including the grocery store that hosts the crew.

[Stacey Rasmussen] 

So, they meet every morning from 7 to about 9. We give them a place to sit and have their coffee and they give it back to us tenfold.

[Wicklein] 

And at the end of the month the money goes to Heartland Bank, put in a special account. Then money is given out to usually the grocery store, roller rink, pool, whatever needs, you know, we feel fit to give to.

[Kathy Carlson] 

There's always been a store in Gowrie. That's something that we often take for granted. But yes, in a small town it is crucial to have and it is hard as heck to keep open.

[Nebbe] 

Founded in the mid-1800s, at one time Gowrie had three grocery stores as four separate train lines stopped in town. Today only Market on Market remains. And after being a family run business for more than half a century, the fate of the store became uncertain.

[Carlson] 

Jeff Peterson had ran the store from about 1986 to 2018. Before that his dad ran the store Jamboree. They did sell it to a different individual who had a chain of stores and that didn't last very long. So, from 2018 to 2019 is when we started to see things trend down. We saw trucks weren't coming in, we weren't getting the milk, the bread, the eggs, the produce.

All signs were pointing towards closure.

[Nebbe] 

Without its grocery store, Gowrie is what the USDA calls a food desert or a community with limited access to affordable and nutritious food. First recognized by the Federal Government in 2008, food deserts are found across the United States in big cities to small towns.

[Marcie Boerner] 

So, for Gowrie having a grocery store it is so important because there is no other grocery stores within a 30-mile drive. It's a 30-minute drive to get to Fort Dodge, it's a 30-minute drive to get to Jefferson, it's a 30-minute drive to Ogden. So, we're kind of the center of this radius that does not have access to a grocery store.

[Rasmussen] 

Gary's about a thousand people. There's people in town that they can't get to other grocery stores. You know, there are a lot of times they're older people and they don't get the whole online thing. And this is a place for them to come and they meet their friends and they shop and they laugh and you know, we try and make it as welcoming as we can.

[Boerner] 

So, when we determined that we could potentially be next and we started getting involved in how do we save our grocery store, the timing was so short that we were really concerned we wouldn't be able to find a new buyer. So that's when we decided we needed to go to the community.

[Nebbe] 

In early January 2020, community leaders held a public meeting in front of a standing room only crowd. More than 150 people showed up to learn a new buyer was unlikely to be found and keeping the store open would require community support. With a shutdown weeks away, the town would need to form an LLC and raise $250,000 to buy the building, equipment and stock the shelves.

[Boerner] 

We were very clear that that was not necessarily going to be a money-making situation. It was to keep the business that we have open.

[Carlson] 

It's for profit, but we're not making a huge profit. We were very straightforward with them and said, this is not an investment that you're going to see a return on.

[Boerner] 

But I think a lot of people were very happy about the idea that I'm investing in the future of the community.

[Nebbe] 

Nine days after the initial community meeting, 60 people came forward to donate to the cause and officially become the new owners of the soon to be named Market on Market grocery store. In just over a week, Gowrie went from the brink of becoming a food desert to raising $250,000 and saving a town staple.

[Carlson] 

It was right after we purchased the store. I was working here late at night trying to get things cleaned up, and I had a call from my youngest daughter and she said, did we do it? And I said, do what? She said, did we save the store? And I said, we did it.

(music)

(rooster crowing)

[Nebbe] 

Half a decade later, Market on Market is still open. However, the store's success required federal grants, zero interest loans, and surprisingly, Gowrie being recognized as a food desert allowed the store to partner with a nonprofit fundraising arm which has made the store viable.

[Carlson] 

Without that fund, we would have been closed a long time ago. You know, we've had over $100,000 given to that foundation that we've been able to replace our roof, our heating. We've been able to update our point-of-sale system. We've received over $15,000, I think, in the last three years from the coffee guys.

[Wicklein] 

The grocery stores needed help and we have given them a lot of money over the last many years. We enjoy doing it and everybody has fun. It ain't fun when you get stuck and you have to pay, but there's guys been playing for 30, 40 years and it's kind of a cool thing that we like to do.

(music)

[Nebbe] 

Next we'll meet Des Moines artist Jill Wells, whose tactile braille infused public art explores accessibility, equality, and history, inviting everyone to experience the stories that inspire her work. Take a moment to think of a piece of art. Is it a painting? A sculpture? Whatever you're envisioning, you're probably not allowed to run your hands over it.

But if you can't see, how are you supposed to experience that art? For Jill Wells, art is a universal form of expression and should be universally accepted.

[Jill Wells] 

If I don't have access to art and someone else doesn't have access to it, and I, as one single person, feel like I could change that, I do believe it's my responsibility to do that, and I find that to be vitally important because it acts as a vehicle of communication and information.

[Nebbe] 

Jill was born and raised in Indianola as the youngest of three. She grew up making art with her siblings and grandmother and received encouraging feedback from teachers all the way through high school. As she was getting ready to study art in college, her brother Lee suffered a brain aneurysm that rocked her family's life.

[Wells] 

He was in a coma for about 11 months, and the prognosis was not positive. His friends, most specifically, who had never I don't think I'd ever seen them pray before, they were doing that. He woke up one day and he had to learn how to do everything all over again. And then one of the impacts of that aneurysm was the loss of his eyesight.

 

Things shifted so much so fast, and not knowing how to connect with him and just this whole other world of, like, who he is now, and it took a long time.

[Nebbe] 

This experience made Jill feel a responsibility to create pieces of art that anyone, regardless of ability, can enjoy.

[Wells] 

This is contracted braille, which is like a shorthand for very common words. So, for this process here, I'm taking information out of a couple different sets of text. Then I'll go ahead and kind of drill through and provide, like, a, kind of like a level of access through light. The conversation around this series is looking at perception.

And so, I wanted to use that word and explore all these different variations of what happens to your perception when you have certain information and then when you don't have information. So, we'll pull this up, see how we're looking. I like to explore inaccessibility at the same time that I talk about accessibility, because we have so many inaccessibilities in our world and we all experience it.

So, I hope that this starts to cause people to, like, stop and question, like, well, why is it like that? And then it can prompt the conversation around it. A lot of times, like, the elephant in the room is like why so you do braille?

I always feel, like, pressure to tell my brother's story in a way, which that's not pressure, but it's like the pressure to explain myself. I always question, like, why? What if I didn't have that experience? Would it not be okay if I was in love with this text? You know, I don't know the answer to that question, but I ask it a lot.

(music)

[Nebbe] 

Jill specializes in painting murals and creating interactive installations that incorporate sound, light, and touch. 

(music)

Her work can be found in public schools, on city buildings, and in community gathering spaces, ensuring that art is available for everyone. In 2023, Jill created Iowa's first multisensory tactile mural at Martin Luther King Elementary School in Des Moines.

The piece features both braille and a 3D model of the mural as part of its description plaque.

[Wells] 

There's so many barriers for us to actually be able to engage with art. I'm interested in removing as many of those barriers to the access of art as possible because I find art to be tremendously transformative and powerful.

[Nebbe] 

For Jill's brother, art is a means for connection and expression. 

[Lee Simmons]

Rolling, rolling, rolling, here I come. 

I've always loved art, whether it be painting or drawing or coloring. I don't want to blend in with everybody around me. I want to stand out.

[Nebbe] 

In the spring of 2025, Lee took his art to a new level when he was able to help his sister paint a mural on the west side of Sioux City. 

[Wells]

Shimmy to the right. Shimmy, shimmy, shimmy. All right, I'm going to hand you your roller. Lay that whole thing nice and flat. There you go. You'll feel it. And you can't mess this wall up. There's so much space. We got a lot to cover. Working with my brother on a mural was something I only dreamt of.

It's very serendipitous that it's also around music because that's such a part of his art in his world, and that's how he's currently creating. So, there's seven different languages in the mural. Talks about music as universal language. I don't think his doctors would have ever imagined he'd be doing something like this. It's incredible.

[Nebbe] 

That's it for this episode. Thank you for joining me as we celebrate discovery, innovation, and community spirit. I'm Charity Nebbe. See you next time for more Iowa Life.

(music)

 

[Announcer] 

Funding for Iowa Life is provided by the Lainie Grimm Fund for Inclusive Programming at the Iowa PBS Foundation. And by Friends, the Iowa PBS Foundation.