Clinton, IA, on the Lincoln Highway, Sept. 2016.
It was very pretty along the river (especially in the morning mist). There’s a riverboat now being used as a performance venue. Gorgeous historic courthouse (1897).
Clinton used to be a center of the lumber industry but the forests have been depleted and the sawmills closed. It also was once home to much manufacturing and heavy industry but as I understand it there have been significant plant closings and job losses. I drove by a huge Purina plant (pictured).The downtown seemed very tired. I was rather shocked by the sad looking condition of the area where I got off the bridge from Illinois (called Lyons).
Clinton was my last stop on the September Lincoln Highway trip. I turned around, headed back across the Mississippi and began my drive to O’Hare to drop the car and catch the flight back to New York. Clinton was as far as I got on the east-to-west portion of my Lincoln Highway journeys in 2016.
I’ll be back in Iowa again on the west-to-east drive starting in March 2017.
