COMMON GROUND: Resilience
Planting My Feet
The story of two-year-old me planting my feet in the mashed potatoes in the dining room of the Hotel Manning in Keosauqua, Iowa followed me from childhood to adulthood. My dad relished telling the story of the Sunday morning we met my grandparents, Aunt Harriet and Uncle John for Sunday dinner after church. They had ordered fried chicken and mashed potatoes with gravy. The hotel was a short drive from my grandparents’ farm south of Milton. It was a special occasion, but the wait had been long, and I was cranky. When the food finally arrived, I splattered the potatoes over everyone. My mother took me out, missing her own Sunday dinner, one of the few she didn’t have to cook.
Because of that story and because we passed the hotel, situated beside the Des Moines River every time we visited my grandparents, it became my personal iconic landmark. Years later, in college, I used the Hotel Manning as a setting for a children’s novel I wrote for my senior project. Set in the 1920’s during the Farm Depression, it focused on a girl living at the hotel with her mother who was employed there.
As a child I loved listening to the grownups tell stories about the people who lived in the small towns and on the farms of southern Iowa. They became my characters, and the hotel was the perfect setting for my young protagonist to learn and grow from the transitory people she encountered. The book wasn’t published, but it set the course for me as a storyteller and writer.
Farm Payment
When Tom and I made our home in Mt. Pleasant in 1975, the Hotel Manning continued to be part of our lives. He and my dad had permission to hunt on the land that Dad and his sisters had sold to a neighbor after my grandparents died. There were still quail among the fence rows when our boys were growing up. Dad and I returned there to gather hickory nuts for cakes and Christmas cookies.
On Memorial Day the Lions Club prepared dinner at the Milton school to raise money for the cemetery. Afterwards my dad, my Aunt Jessie and our family would leave roses on the headstones of our departed family members. Then we’d drive the back road to Keosauqua stopping by the Lebanon Cemetery to pay our respects to my great grandfather, my dad’s namesake.
As fate would have it, in 1991 Tom was hired to try a will-contest case in the Van Buren County Courthouse, the oldest in Iowa. When he won the case, his client paid him with one of the seven farms he’d inherited, located just a few miles from the home-farm my dad always regretted selling.
During the trial Tom ate at the local café every day. He noticed that someone had refurbished the Hotel Manning. He treated me to a night there. The food was good, but there weren’t enough bathrooms to go around so some guests had to share.
When we moved to the Governor’s Mansion, we continued our visits to Davis and Van Buren Counties on Memorial Day. Sometimes when we passed the Hotel Manning, it seemed in disrepair. Occasionally the river flooded the hotel, once in 1993, again in 2003 and 2008.
During the Pandemic we’d take a picnic and tailgate on the land that made it possible for us to send our boys to college.
The Grande Dame Hotel Manning
When I joined the Iowa Writers Collaborative a few months ago, I learned that they’d scheduled a retreat in Keosauqua at the Hotel Manning in April. How could I resist two days in one of my favorite places meeting new friends with a passion for writing? I knew they’d help me master the technology that made me leery of an online column, but also looked forward to visiting an old friend, the Hotel Manning.
On Friday I crested the hill that descended to the bridge crossing the Des Moines River into Keosauqua, which means “bend in the river” in the languages of the Meskwaki and Sauk tribes. I drew in my breath at the hotel bathed in the evening light. The grande dame was looking pretty good, like an iced layer cake.
I already knew a lot of the writers gathered for the retreat. Some of them had bylines that most Iowans would recognize from reading The Des Moines Register and other major newspapers that have been diminished by social media news or consumed by conglomerates. Other writers, like me, had worked for Iowa’s small dailies or had written or edited magazines that served rural readers.
Some had retired but still wanted to write. Others had lost jobs to downsizing so they tried something new. A few were trying podcasting or mixed media storytelling, like Julie Gammack, the founder of The Collaborative, who hosts Iowa Potluck. There were songwriter-musicians, a food critic, a quilter turned novelist, an executive turned columnist.
A few make a living from writing, but most do not. Writers may charge or not. Readers may choose to pay or read for free. Some choose a combination of both. It’s certainly a novel way to provide news, opinion and feature stories in a truly democratic way.
A Resilience of Writers
In the two days I spent with them, I came to realize that these writers are much like the hotel and the town where we met--resilient. Like the hotel, they recover quickly from difficult conditions. Spending time in a place that has meaning for me with people who make meaning for others through their writing, gave me a sense of resolve.
It's unsettling to watch the disappearance of newspapers, the disparagement of the people who write and present the news, and the attacks on freedom of speech guaranteed in the 1st Amendment. I worry that citizens will not have the factual information they need to make educated decisions about complex issues facing our country.
At the Hotel Manning, I witnessed writers committed to their craft figuring out how to adapt to the ever-changing world of communications. These writers resist by refusing to give up. They insist they are writers even if that means expanding the definition. They are confident they can learn new technologies to get their messages to the public. I say, “More power to them!” figuratively and literally. They know how to research, how to interview, how to follow a story and illustrate it. Their only barrier is learning how to distribute in different ways. “No sweat!” They, and others like them across the country, will reinvent a marketplace of ideas and unite us in the process.
“I Just Knew It Couldn’t Go Away”
Saturday morning, I rose with the sun to take a walk. The morning light made the river a silver ribbon. A crisp wind teased the trees—crabapples, pears, the redbuds. Blossoms shimmered like senior girls dressed for prom. Resilience again, a lesson that nature teaches every spring. Just when we think the trees have died, the flowers will never bloom, after an icy spring and a freezing winter, they reemerge.
Considering the demise of so many small towns in rural America, the hotel and all of Keosauqua exuded resilience. That doesn’t just happen. Someone had to care enough to find new ways to preserve what matters.
Joy Padget, General Manager of the Hotel Manning grew up in nearby Douds. She tried to buy the hotel herself once. “I just knew that it couldn’t go away. Someone needed to bring some life back into it.”
In the planning stages of revitalization, every community organization mentioned the hotel as an iconic place. Joy was part of a group of 70, now 87, local investors who contributed $5000 each in 2018. The hotel is now “community owned”.
The hotel joined the National Register of Historic places in 1973. That designation allowed the hotel to qualify for Department of the Interior resources and for State Historical Preservation tax credits.
Young people in Keosauqua are as invested in the hotel as their parents and grandparents. They hold their senior prom in the courtyard. The hotel employs 11-15 of them each year, including Brooklyn, a high school senior who offered to carry my suitcase up the grand staircase.
Joy said spring will bring the kayakers, the hikers, the fishing enthusiasts, the birders, and the history buffs. Come fall, the turkey hunters will arrive. Some will stay in the historic hotel. Families will stay in the motor lodge or one of the adjacent cabins along the river. They’ll enjoy Lacey State Park and the other Villages of Van Buren County, a brand that continues to bring guests to this collaborative of rural communities that worked together to survive.
If you get a chance, stop along one of Iowa’s most scenic byways. Enjoy the plush towels, the comfy beds and the modern bathrooms, now one per room. You’ll come away feeling more resilient. At least I did.
This is a delightful, thoughtful and personal recap of our retreat. Well done!
Thank you for sharing the sweet memories of Keosauqua and the Hotel Manning with us, Christie. The community efforts to save the hotel and reinvent the whole area does seem to be the very definition of resilience. It is definitely on the list for a road trip!