Iowa Historic Property Study

The Manthei Ford Garage is located at 350 Main Street W in the center of downtown Maynard, Iowa. In January 2006, the Iowa Department of Transportation (IA DOT) contracted the Iowa Highway Archaeology Program to conduct a Phase I investigation of a stone culvert. Marlin R. Ingalls, who conducted the study, concluded that the garage was eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion A as an "important example of an early Fayette County and Iowa Highway Commission era of automobile transportation." The IA DOT contracted The Louis Berger Group, Inc. to complete this Iowa Historic Property Study to mitigate any potential damage to the Manthei Ford Garage that may occur during construction. At the time of the Phase I investigation, water from the creek had already damaged a piling on the building.

In 1978 historian Joseph Wall wrote that Iowa was “still seeking to assert its own identity. . . . It has no real center where the elite of either power, wealth, or culture may congregate. Iowa, in short, is middle America.” In this collection of well-written and accessible essays, originally published in 1996, seventeen of the Hawkeye State’s most accomplished historians reflect upon the dramatic and not-so-dramatic shifts in the middle land’s history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Marvin Bergman has drawn upon his years of editing the Annals of Iowa to gather contributors who cross disciplines, model the craft of writing a historical essay, cover more than one significant topic, and above all interpret history rather than recite it. In his preface to this new printing, he calls attention to publications that begin to fill the gaps noted in the 1996 edition. Rather than survey the basic facts, the essayists engage readers in the actual making of Iowa’s history by trying to understand the meaning of its past. By providing comprehensive accounts of topics in Iowa history that embrace the broader historiographical issues in American history, such as the nature of Progressivism and Populism, the debate over whether women’s expanded roles in wartime carried over to postwar periods, and the place of quantification in history, the essayists contribute substantially to debates at the national level at the same time that they interpret Iowa’s distinctive culture.

"Upgrading U.S. Highway 30 from near Shady Oaks Road east of Marshalltown, in Marshall County, east 17.5 miles to near "M" Avenue, east of Tama in Tama County ... Within this corridor, a four-lane, divided section is proposed.