THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART X. 583 



have planted trees, it is true, but they have been generally of the cheaper, 

 more rapidly growing varieties which should most quickly respond to 

 our need of shelter. 



But today all these conditions have entirely changed. In the first 

 place we are no longer destroying natural beauty; there is little of it 

 left for our injury or desecration; the prairies are plowed almost to the 

 last acre; the woodlands have been cleared away entirely or converted 

 into pasture lands dry and destitute of all but starving represenatives 

 of our hardiest arboreal vegetation; the streams near the town are the 

 dumping places of all uncleanness. and in the country are esteemed 

 only as convenient places for watering domestic animals. The beauty, 

 and the concomitant disadvantages, of human occupation have succeeded 

 upon the wild freshness of primeval nature, and we are now left to manage 

 the situation for ourselves. 



In the second place we are no longer poor. The wealth of Iowa has 

 easily doubled in six years, not in the sudden expanse of corporate prop- 

 erty, or the accumulations of some enormous trust affecting the fortunes 

 of a favored few, but in a widely disseminated prosperity affecting the 

 fortunes of every property bolder in the state. We are able to do what 

 we please. 



In the third place we are no longer careless. We are actually in- 

 terested. In fact the plain people in their thousands have never wholly 

 lost interest. Through all the years there has been unceasing constant 

 effort. There is not a town in the state that has not made some effort 

 toward outdoor adornment, civic beauty. There is probably not a 

 free-holder in town or country who has not expended money in purchase of 

 nursery stock for ornamental purposes only. And we are at this moment 

 all interested in this thing, more interested by far than ever before, and with 

 our increasing wealth more able than ever before to carry forward intelli- 

 gent and wisely directed enterprise having for its end improvement in our 

 artistic and esthetic living. In order to ascertain with some exactness 

 just the condition of our Iowa towns in regard to parks and civic improve- 

 ment generally I have written to the clerks of the principal towns and 

 villages of Iowa asking certain questions relating to the present topic. 

 Out of more than 150 replies, only six report no parks at all. There is 

 everywhere some attempt. Seventy towns in Iowa have the old-fashioned 

 square in the middle of the town and, of these, forty-two use the square 

 for some public building, generally the court house. There are reported 

 in say 150 Iowa towns altogether 1,300 acres devoted to park purposes. 

 This, if equally distributed, might not be so bad; about nine acres on an 

 average to each town — but Des Moines reports 465 acres of this amount, 

 and Cedar Falls follows with 200; half the total acreage in connection 

 with two cities. This reveals our situation. The greater number of the 

 towns of Iowa have, as a matter of fact, no parks — simply in the majority 

 of cases a square or two in the center of the town, and this too often 

 given up to some special, or only semi-public purpose. 



It is a singular circumstance, albeit perhaps a perfectly natural 

 thing, that our cemeteries have in nearly all the counties received much 



