Highways and Byways: Reporting from Convict Road

By Maik Strosahl

While doing a load in eastern Iowa a few weeks ago, I saw a street sign for “Convict Road.” I figured there must be a prison nearby, but never saw one. After stopping at my next store, I decided to satisfy my curiosity and look it up. Turns out, there is no prison, but it is a historic stretch of road.
    When cars started becoming more abundant in the early 1900s, there was an area east of the Fredonia bridge over the Iowa river that was difficult for vehicles to pass through due to all the sand. They tried several solutions, but nothing was working well enough to support the growing traffic.
    The cement we take for granted today was extremely expensive in their time, more than a rural community could really afford to spend. So, in 1914, they decided to use convict labor from the Anamosa Men’s Reformatory to pour a 1.5-mile strip of cement for the “astronomical” cost of about $10,000 per mile—an amount decried by locals as being so expensive it would probably be the first and last piece of concrete poured in all of Louisa County.
    While convict labor had been used to help build the construction of university buildings in Iowa and in big city projects out east, this was one of the first examples of the use of convict labor in the U.S. to build a rural road, and that piece of highway was key to opening up the western part of Iowa and further.
    We have all seen our infrastructure crumble, and parts of our interstate system are very hard to drive in their relatively short history, but that original 1.5-mile, 14-foot wide strip of cement called Convict Road is still in service and in relative good shape after 108 years.
    I imagined this local political drama being reported on in those pre-WWI days and came up with today’s poem.

Reporting from Convict Road

Dateline: Fredonia, August 1914.
With all the sand here
on the banks of the I-o-way,
and the influx of all these
auto-mobiles coming out
from Columbus Junction
on towards Fredonia,
the county board approved
this stretch be paved
with ce-ment,
providing the reformatory
up there in Anamosa
sends us a few convicts
to do the work,
maybe allow them to wear
“respectable grays,”
pay those boys a little something
for the months of September,
maybe October,
surely to be done
‘fore the snow flies.

That ce-ment better hold up good
or it might be the last piece
of concrete poured
in all of Louisa County,
on a count of its cost.

Copyright © 2022 by Maik Strosahl Michael E. Strosahl has focused on poetry for over twenty years, during which time he served a term as President of the Poetry Society of Indiana. He relocated to Jefferson City, Missouri, in 2018 and currently co-hosts a writers group there.