Kevin Wilbeck

“I was thinking about this old corn crib my father-in-law Joe McDermott has on the land he farmed right up next to the railroad, or the trail today. I started thinking it’d be neat if we could ever get that crib moved so it sits right over the trail – you’d ride right through it. It seems like it’d add some fun, probably be a real landmark on the trail and besides that, it’d probably help a lot of city people think a little more about how farming really works.”

Kevin Wilbeck is an Iowa State University-educated mechanical engineer, a leading salesman of fixtures and fittings used in major industrial plants, and a responsible husband and father.

Sounds pretty conventional, right?

But if you turn the 47-year-old Wilbeck loose with a sketch pad, you’ll see some ideas that just don’t occur to most of us.

You realize that he is part visionary, part artist and part pack-rat who believes that virtually everything has a second use, maybe a third use. Fascinated by art, architecture, history and recreation, Wilbeck has come up with nine drawings that show what might be done with existing buildings that are now located on or near the RRVT – how they could be redeveloped as real amenities and attractions along the trail.

Joe McDermott’s corn crib in southern Greene County could be moved to the trail so cyclists would ride right through it!

“I really like the potential for tying the trail today to the agricultural heritage around it, and to its railroad heritage,” said Wilbeck, an Iowa native who moved back to his home state’s countryside in 2002 after 11 years in sales in the Chicago area.

He, his wife Chris and young son Jake live on an acreage southwest of Rippey, and he serves on the board of directors of the Raccoon River Valley Trail Association.

“I’ve always been one to figure that you can surely make something out of all the scrap stuff everybody’s got laying around farms,” Kevin continued. “I’m not one to throw much away, because you just know there’ll be some good use for it.”

All of that shapes how he sees the trail and what he thinks can be done along it.

He started the first of this trail drawings months ago, after his friends Dr. Jim and Nancy Teusch, of Jefferson, bought a century-old white-frame boarding house located across the street from the old railroad depot that serves as the trailhead in that community. The building had originally been the “Railroad Inn,” catering to the passengers on the Des Moines Western Railroad trains, and later those on the Wabash and Milwaukee Road trains that were coming through Jefferson.

Wilbeck’s drawings have helped shaped the Teusches’ plans for the renovation that they now have underway to turn the old inn into a place for today’s trail users to stay.

In Jefferson, Dr. Jim and Nancy Teusch are renovating a century-old frame building that was once the Railroad Inn, across the street from the Milwaukee Road’s depot. That depot has been restored as the trailhead center in Jefferson, and the Teusches say their renovated inn will soon be catering to trail users.

“Right after I started drawing the Teusches’ place, then I was thinking about this old corn crib my father-in-law Joe McDermott has on the land he farmed in southern Greene County,” Wilbeck said. “His land ran right up to the railroad, or the trail today, and I started thinking it’d be neat if we could ever get that crib moved so it sits right over the trail – you’d ride right through it. It seems like it’d add some fun, probably be a real landmark on the trail and besides that, it’d probably help a lot of city people think a little more about how farming really works.”

And, after that, other old buildings started leaping out at him as he rode his bicycle on the trail and drove the nearby roads.

Wilbeck said that, having dismantled a couple of these old farm buildings on his own property, he’s come to realize just how well they were built, and how sturdy they really are, even after they start deteriorating.

Of course, being able to sketch out new uses for such buildings requires some artistic talent.

“It’s always been just a hobby for me,” he said. “Back in grade school, there were two or three of us who started drawing war scenes, then in high school it was cars and by college I was drawing cars and houses. I’ve got a stack of 10 or 12 tablets that have a crazy mix of drawings in them – furniture, cartoons, buildings, T-shirt designs. I find that in recent years, it’s become a thing that if I have an idea about something, the only way I can keep from forgetting it is to draw it out on paper.”

He said that when he gets an idea that he is especially excited about, “I’ll get really intense into it. I’ll be up thinking about it, sketching it, and all of a sudden I’ll realize, ‘Oh my God, it’s midnight!’ When I get my creative juices flowing, they just take over. I have trouble getting anything else done.”

Renovation work on several of the buildings that Wilbeck has drawn is already started – notably the round gym in Yale, the old railroad depot in Dawson, Teusches’ inn in Jefferson. Of course, they might not wind up looking just like he imagines them.

Hopefully, as people browse his drawings, and hear about what kind of business and tourism developments have been successful on other trails, more of Wilbeck’s ideas can be turned into real projects.

He has one of those projects in mind on his own farmstead. He envisions converting a huge corn crib there into overnight accommodations for users of the Raccoon River Valley Trail, kayakers/canoeists on the North Raccoon River and other visitors to the area.

Wilbeck is employed by R.S. Stover Co., which does sales and consulting for Fisher Controls International LLC, based in Marshalltown. He travels western Iowa and much of Nebraska doing sales of, and consulting on, fixtures and fittings used in plants producing fertilizer, ammonia and natural gas.

The Wilbecks are among a growing group of us in Iowa who are looking at trails as more than just recreational resources, or long linear parks.

We think they are also economic engines if they are promoted well.

Two years ago, we took a good hard look at our Raccoon River Valley Trail, a hard-surfaced trail that stretches 56 miles from Jefferson to the west side of the Des Moines metro area.

We asked the trail-building Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation, what it would cost today, if we had just acquired the railroad right-of-way that this 18-year-old trail is located on, to build the RRVT as it is now? The startling answer: $11.3 million!

That changed the perception of a whole lot of people out our way. We decided to begin looking at the trail as an $11.3 million piece of economic development infrastructure that we already have in place. Now, what can we do along it to build on that value? With the trail now connected into the Des Moines metro area’s trail system, what can we do to increase the annual number of RRVT users, from the estimated 100,000 per year now to numbers three or four times that? What kind of amenties will draw those people into all the communities along our trail, as well as into those communities that will be on the new 33-mile “north loop” being added?

We’ve seen it happen elsewhere – most notably on the Root River State Trail in southeast Minnesota that we are using as our model – and we believe there’s no reason it can’t happen here.

– Chuck Offenburger

The old railroad depot in Dawson is already owned by the Dallas County Conservation Board and grants have been received for its restoration into a trailhead station.

In the village of Herndon, there is a huge steel building owned by the Farmers Cooperative Co., based in Farnhamville, that was once used to hold up to 800,000 bushels of corn. Kevin Wilbeck sees it becoming the “Herndon Trail Center,” including overnight accommodations for trail users, perhaps a shop or two, maybe a bicycle museum and more.

This gas station, now owned by the City of Jefferson, once served motorists passing through the community on U.S. Highway 30, “the Lincoln Highway.” The route was later moved a mile north of town on a new highway. The station, located with two blocks of the trailhead, could become a bicycle shop and snack stand, in Kevin Wilbeck’s view.

Chuck and Carla Offenburger have a delapidated shed on their farmstead along the trail, just south of Cooper, and they were thinking about tearing it down. Kevin Wilbeck thinks it should be renovated as one of the “Cooper Cabins” trailside in the town of 30 people.

A set of barns owned by Roger Herr on the northwest corner of Waukee could become an RRVT “Welcome Center” there, on a point of land between the current trail and the start of the planned “north loop.”

The old round gymnasium in Yale is being restored by the City of Yale, and could become a center for live theater, small concerts, community gatherings and, yes, still some basketball, too!

Article Published: 02-15-2007