For Milestone Veterans Day, One Iowa Town Goes All Out

Iowa Culture
Nov 4 · 3 min read

While most Iowa fields are now bare and brown, one small plot in Corning will burst forth in full bloom. Local volunteers plan to “plant” more than 4,000 red yarn poppies in the city’s Central Park to honor each of the Iowans who served and died in World War I.

The volunteers met each Wednesday for the past year and a half to crochet the flowers for the 101st anniversary of the war’s end. Other handmade poppies were sent in from 10 different states.

Volunteers with “the Wednesday poppy group” crocheted yarn flowers for 18 months. (Photo: Corning Center for the Fine Arts)

Veterans Day “is one of those things you expect everyone else to take up, but many times they don’t,” said organizer Linda Shearer with the Corning Center for the Fine Arts. “Or sometimes they do the same thing every year and people quit attending.”

So this year folks decided to do “something different and something special,” she said, to remember the war that officially ended at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918.

The names of all the Iowan casualties will be read before a memorial ceremony scheduled for 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 10.

The Iowa National Guard is sending a woodwind quintet to perform, and the State Historical Society of Iowa’s “World War I Honor Roll” is on display through the end of the month at the nearby Corning Opera House. The traveling exhibit features the names and photos of Iowa’s fallen heroes — an estimated 4,088 of the total 114,217 Iowans who served during the war.

A block south, the Corning Center for the Fine Arts is hosting another traveling exhibit called “One Man, One War, One Hundred Years,” with eleven paintings by the Urbandale artist Michael Wilson.

Michael Wilson of Urbandale

He was inspired to paint sepia-toned images of World War I soldiers after discovering the diary of his great uncle, Herbert Thordsen, who fought in the war and returned home to the western Iowan town of Persia. Wilson found his great uncle’s small leather datebook in a box of family memorabilia, along with his battalion photo and the flag from his funeral.

Herbert Thordsen of Persia, Iowa, kept this diary during his service in World War I. (Photo: Michael Wilson)

“He died in 1977, when I was about 14 or 15,” Wilson said. “I always wanted to talk to him about the war but I was too young to process it or even ask questions.”

Instead, he decided to create the paintings as a way to open a conversation. He chose 11 scenes from his great uncle’s diary, from enlisting to training to operating a machine gun in the trenches.

“What would that feel like? He was just 22 or 23, you know,” Wilson said.

Two paintings from Michael Wilson’s series “One Man, One War, One Hundred Years”

Before the current show in Corning, the paintings debuted last year at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art and moved to the Iowa Gold Star Military Museum at Camp Dodge in Johnston, where curator Michael Vogt said the artwork affects visitors in ways words and artifacts can’t.

“There are many military traditions — marching, saluting, standing at attention — that look the same now as they did 100 years ago,” he said. “Images can make a time period, no matter how long ago, seem like it was yesterday.”

Michael Morain, Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs

Iowa History

State Historical Society of Iowa. Preserving and providing access to Iowa History.

Iowa Culture

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The Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs empowers Iowa to build and sustain culturally vibrant communities by connecting Iowans to resources. iowaculture.gov

Iowa History

State Historical Society of Iowa. Preserving and providing access to Iowa History.

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