Our friend David at the 42N blog once again brings us news from Iowa. On May 3 the Palisades Hotel near Mount Vernon, Iowa, was demolished in just three hours; at right are before and after pics from his blog. He writes, “The structure was built in the 1880s and was known as the Cedar Springs Hotel. Its original guests were railroad employees working on a nearby quarry…. Palisades Hotel was the place to go long before the convenience of getting there was possible. The hotel stood 20 years or so before the Lincoln Highway was built nearby and many more years before modern State Highway 30 came even closer. Better roads and more reliable cars made visiting other sites around the region more accessible, and eventually helped lead the hotel into retirement in the 1950s. The demolition of the Palisades Hotel (aka Cedar Springs Hotel, Upper Palisades Hotel, Palisades Hotel, Biderman Hotel, and Old Dutch Inn) marks the end of an era when this site served as a gathering place for legions of students, families and relaxation seeker.”
Tags: highway history, hotel demolished, IA, Lincoln Highway, Mount Vernon Iowa, old hotel, Route 30
Lincoln Highway News 
June 28, 2010 at 10:17 pm |
My father, Thomas Moore, purchased a Mobile gasoline -service station along the Lincoln Highway – HWY 30 in July of 1941. A small pre A and W refreshment structure was expanded by him to create a 3 bedroom house for our family of 6 children. He purchased the gasoline station, with its 3 gravity-feed pumps, because of the volume of over the road trucks and tourist traffic. We did well until gasoline was rationed in 1942. Although the service station remained open, services provided by our mother and 6 children, my father began working at Collins Radio in Cedar Rapids. I have fond memories of the sounds of the trucks coming down off the train viaduct and the many tourists from the East or West Coast who stopped to visit or have lunch in the picnic area behind the station.