RRVT News
Jefferson Telco Trust gives 11,550 dollars for RRVT signs
Mike Beeler (left) and Mike Wallace of the Dallas County Conservation Board show off one of the new RRVT trailhead signs
JEFFERSON, Iowa, Jan. 20, 2007 – A new signage system, designed by Iowa State University students and valued at nearly 50,000 dollars, will go up on the Raccoon River Valley Trail during the 2007 trail season.
Installation of the complete system will start this spring along the 12 miles of the trail in Greene County, funded by an 11,550-dollar grant from the Jefferson Telephone Company Charitable Trust announced here. The phone company serves most of Greene County.
“With the Jefferson Telephone Trust, we’re strong proponents of enhancing recreational opportunities in the county,” said Jim Daubendiek, general manager of the company. “And we’re also proponents of trying to help grow business in our communities. It seems like this trail has the potential for both.”
The same style of signage will be used on all 56 miles of the RRVT, on through Guthrie and Dallas Counties. The Raccoon River Valley Trail Association, which promotes the trail, is doing additional fundraising now to help pay for the signs in those two counties. The estimated costs there are 13,455 dollars in Guthrie County and 22,515 in Dallas. Eventually, the same signage will be used on a 33-mile “north loop” of the RRVT, being planned now through Perry.
The new signage was researched, planned and designed in the spring and summer of 2005 by 10 senior-level students in the ISU College of Design and their instructor Cheri Ure, a native of Cooper, which is on the RRVT, and still a resident of Greene County. She said the project presented a good learning opportunity in environmental design.
“This kind of a project provides an outreach into the community — in this case my community and the surrounding counties — by some of our best students at Iowa State,” Ure said. “I knew it would be a huge undertaking. In fact, we created a class specifically for this project because it was going to be so time intensive. It is almost impossible to estimate the number of hours that five groups of two-person teams spent researching and designing, to come up with four different end results. We then selected the best components of the four and reconfigured to create a final signage system.”
Ure and her students met four times in Ames with the conservation directors from the three counties — Dan Towers from Greene, Joe Hanner from Guthrie and Mike Wallace from Dallas — as well as with other founding board members of the RRVT Association. The students conducted interviews on the history of the trail, which is built on a former railroad right-of-way, and of the communities and the counties. They studied the agricultural and business economies operating adjacent to the trail, as well as all the natural attractions near it — including parks, the North and Middle Raccoon Rivers, prairies, wildflowers, animal and plant life.
They drove on the trail with the conservation directors, looking at the farms, homes, former railroad depots and commercial buildings along it. They also visited with sign fabrication companies to understand what the costs would be of different kinds of materials for making the signs and erecting them, so that they would be able to withstand harsh weather and vandalism.
Ultimately, the students decided the general theme of the signage should be the trail’s railroad heritage. They talked about how the various railroad companies which operated on the right-of-way, brought visitors and commerce to the three counties in west central Iowa. Now the Raccoon River Valley Trail does the same thing, with an estimated 100,000 trail users per year. The color schemes of beige, brown, green and soft gold reflect the natural heritage along the trail.
The first of the new signs were fabricated in the fall of 2006, four large trailhead signs for the Dallas County communities along the trail — Waukee, Adel, Redfield and Linden. Wallace, the Dallas County Conservation director, had earmarked and saved some funding over the years for eventual new signage along the trail, and used it to pay for those four signs. They are to be installed as soon as warm weather returns.
With the Jefferson Telephone Co. Charitable Trust donation, 14 new signs will go up along the trail in Greene County. They include large trailhead signs in Jefferson and Cooper; a 3-sided informational kiosk to go trailside in Jefferson about the community’s history and amenities; four signs to tell trail users they are in Jefferson, at the North Raccoon River trestle bridge, at Winkleman Switch and in Cooper, and seven signs that will detail the number of miles to all those stops.
“We have said all along that we think this new signage system will be the best on any trail in the U.S.,” said Carla Offenburger, of Cooper, president of the RRVT Association. “Chuck and I have ridden on trails all over the country, and we have not seen signs anywhere that are as nicely designed as these, or convey as much information as these will.”
She said the association officers “committed to the Iowa State students and Cheri Ure that we would make their signage project a reality — without really knowing where we were going to find the money to pay for it. But we were confident that if the students produced a high-quality signage system, people would see the benefit of it and give us the financial help we need. When Jim Daubendiek called us about the gift from the Jefferson Telephone Co. Charitable Trust, it made our whole year.”
The RRVT was developed on a railroad right-of-way on which development began in the 1870s. Passenger service ended in 1952, and the last freight trains ran in the mid 1980s. The trail development began in the late 1980s.
In the 2007 season, a three-quarters of a mile stretch of trail in the western part of the city of Des Moines will be completed, and then it will be possible to ride a bicycle on the trail all the way from Jefferson to Principal Park, where the Iowa Cubs play downtown at the confluence of the Raccoon and Des Moines Rivers in the capital city. Completion of the 33-mile “north loop” of the trail is anticipated in the 2008 season. That will extend east from Herndon through Jamaica, Dawson and Perry and then southeast through Minburn and Dallas Center to Waukee.
There were trailhead signs installed in the early 1990s on the original 34 miles of the RRVT, but none had ever been installed from Yale north. Simple mileage indicators were later posted between Herndon and Jefferson, and temporary signs were installed in Jefferson in 2005 and in Cooper in 2006 to mark the trailheads in the communities. The new signage system will be one of the few in the nation that uses a consistent style and them the full length of a trail.
The RRVT Association’s Carla Offenburger noted that the non-profit group hopes eventually to also install “interpretive signs” that will explain the agricultural operations and natural areas in view of the people on the trail.
The association’s work is funded by memberships and contributions. The basic individual membership is 20 dollars and includes a trail pass for the calendar year. Family memberships are 35 dollars and include two trail passes. A “trail supporter” membership of 15 dollars is for people who want to help with the trail but are unlikely to use it. A successful membership gift campaign during the recent holidays pushed the total number of members to about 100.
Article Published: 01-20-2007
