It’s time to celebrate everything that makes our state great, because it’s National Iowa Day!
That’s according to the National Day Calendar™, the website that tracks unusual and unique national days and has a day for just about everything.
So why today? It’s not Iowa’s birthday. That date is Dec. 28, when Iowa was granted statehood back in 1846. But the National Day Calendar folks have declared an official day for each U.S. state in the order they entered the union, and Iowa’s date just happens to be today.
So here are just some of the awesome things about our state:
“Ripley’s Believe It Or Not” has dubbed Burlington’s Snake Alley as the most crooked street in the world.
Iowa is the only state whose east AND west borders are formed entirely by water. Extra points if you know that it’s the Missouri and Big Sioux rivers on our western border and the Mississippi River on the east.
An Iowa native invented sliced bread. Otto Frederick Rohwedder was born and raised in Davenport. He was living in St. Joseph, Mo., when he developed a machine in 1927 that would not only slice bread, but also wrapped it. He patented his invention, and in 1932, sold his patent rights to Micro-Westco Co. of Bettendorf and joined the company. The next year, American bakeries for the first time produced more sliced than unsliced bread loaves.
More than 35 percent of Iowa’s electricity comes from wind power. That’s the result of more than 3,200 wind turbines that are at work here, the highest concentration in the country. Experts predict that wind-generated electricity could reach 40 percent in Iowa by 2020.
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