1983
A reader, intrigued by Kaye Ross’s story about the Cedar Rapids Area Convention & Visitors Bureau bus tour, called to tell us about the old stage coach stop and inn on E Avenue NW. She often heard the inn’s owner and her grandfather talk about it.
She said where the garage is now, meals were cooked for the inn’s guests, and an attached barn extending north housed the horses.
She also said all the rooms on the top floor were tiny, only big enough to hold a bed.
1992
According to our archives, the house was built in 1846 “with square nails, and there used to be a third story before a cyclone swooped the roof off in 1910. The house is on what once was called Old Red Ball Road named for the road markers topped by a red ball. It was later the Lincoln Highway. (October 25, 1983)
across the street from that house a baby was said to have buried under what is now big tree ??
By: j hutton on May 13, 2009
at 1:26 pm
Was the Red Ball Road really a forerunner of the Lincoln Highway? I had always thought of them as two separate routes … the Red Ball a road to Vinton, and the Lincoln Highway the cross-country route. If, in fact, the Red Ball was renamed … and relocated … as the Lincoln, that’s yet another move south for the route over the years. The National Weather Service likes to use Highway 30 as a divider for predicting where storms may occur … “mainly south of Highway 30, etc.” … so perhaps their forecasts have changed over the years, from E Avenue to Johnson Avenue to 16th Avenue and now to Highway 30 at its present location!
I remember, in the early 1950′s, my parents looking at the house on E Avenue when they were considering a move and learning of some of its history then, but instead they opted for a house on Johnson … which, it turns out, is steeped in Lincoln Highway history. I still live in it.
By: Rick Sampson on May 13, 2009
at 2:42 pm