Border Town Search Part 2: Florenceville and Granger

When I last left everyone, I was busy trying to find the twin towns of Florenceville and Granger, only to find that State Line Road had somehow dead-ended into farm country. Later on, when I got home, I would fire up Google Maps and see that State Line Road is not, strictly speaking, a continuous road. If I had a four-wheel drive vehicle on the scale of a monster truck that could also get through thick swampland and a river, then I might have been able to find where the road picked up again. As it was, I backtracked and took the next available road South, headed toward the one paved highway I knew would take me to Florenceville and Granger.

If you really want to know what an area is like, the back roads are the way to do it. In northern Michigan, back roads wind through forests and hills which can sometimes seem like mountains, especially in the winter. Northern Michigan roads can be treacherous with ice and curves and hills that honestly didn’t seem that deep until you try to go up one or crest the hill and find that the slope on the other side seems much steeper than you originally thought. I have had the dubious distinction of driving in an SUV that could not make it up one particular ice-covered hill, and it sticks with you. Driving a sub-compact up an icy hill, you almost expect it to start sliding if you take your foot off the accelerator for so much as a half-second, but when over two tons of Detroit steel surrounding a V8 engine can’t traverse a hill, you get a sense of what the word “impassable” really means.

Iowa backroads are treacherous in their own way. I wouldn’t want to traverse them during the winter, but during the summer the loose gravel and dry dirt made my car fishtail at any speed over 30 mph. It’s only in situations where you have miles of dirt road that stretch out to the horizon that 30 mph starts to become intolerably slow. Especially when either side is populated only by miles and miles of farmland, sans farmhouses.

The farmhouses are worth mentioning, though. Life on the backroads doesn’t really concern itself with being pretty, and that’s very true for farms. It’s not that farmers are a slovenly bunch, it’s more along the lines that when your livelihood comes from working with your hands, you get used to being dirty and if you take a few minutes to stop working on your tractor or tending to livestock to go out and get the mail in a pair of muddy jeans and a flannel shirt that has obviously seen a few years of use, it’s hard to care what some random passerby thinks of you. The old woman in the fluorescent blue sweatpants and pink t-shirt was a bit harder to file in this category, but she was walking back to a farmhouse so she gets the benefit of the doubt.

In fact, the back roads around northeast Iowa seem like the perfect location for a farm. It’s not a bad analogy, either. The farms just sit back, doing their jobs, and let all the big industries zip around over the world, creating hardware, software, trading stock back and forth. They’ve all got to eat sometime, and when they do they’ll buy food from a farmer. It’s a tortoise-and-hare type of scenario that seems not only possible, but likely in rural Iowa. Out here, the myth of the big family farm seems to have taken root.

Finally, after miles of back road, I finally caught some blacktop, and from there I headed to Florenceville and Granger. The direction sign on the paved county road that leads to the two towns only mentions Granger, and after coming upon the two towns, I can now say with some confidence that this is because Florenceville is the smaller of the two towns. Considering that the combined towns have a population of about 1,000, you can get a sense of how small Florenceville is. After I had passed by two or three streets, all dirt roads, I passed by two more and then I was at a T-Bone intersection that marked more or less the end of Granger.

The two towns are, for all intents and purposes one, and I suspect the only reason Florenceville is on the map at all is due to its geographic location. If it were even 200 meters to the north, the town would simply be part of Granger and that would be that. Instead, there is one pastoral little town disguised as two.

Oddly enough, I didn’t see anyone in the town, although the town’s only restaurant, a bar and grill, had a couple cars in front of it. To the northwest, there was a hill and three silos that marked yet another farm. All things considered, I’d driven through Florenceville and Granger in under a minute. That was when I decided I would at least drive along Main Street. I’d taken so much time getting here, it seemed a shame not to take in the sights. So I did, which took a