IA Day 6 -Hobos, Hand-Carved Clocks, and Homemade Chocolates
I started today off with a bang by visiting a fantastic Dutch bakery just outside Des Moines called Van Hemert’s Dutch Oven Bakery. I got a good strong iced coffee to wake me up for the day’s travels and an absolutely incredible pastry called an almond horn which, as the name suggests, is a horn shaped almond pastry. The two ends are then dipped in chocolate which rounds out the flavor beautifully.
My first big stop of the day was National Hobo Museum in Britt. For those like myself who may not know the distinction between “hobo” and other less kind for terms for the unhoused, hobos are defined as generally skilled laborers who have to travel from town to town for work. Nobody is quite sure of the term’s etymology but common theories include that it is derived from the railway greeting “Ho, beau!” or that is an abbreviation for either “homeward bound”, “homeless boy”, or “homeless bohemian”. Over the years, hobos have developed a rich culture of folklore, art, and history, and the museum is dedicated to showing off the breadth of that culture. Britt has been home to the annual National Hobo Convention since 1900, thanks to the town’s friendliness toward migrant workers and its central location within the US, and in the 1980s the town voted to make themselves a permanent home to hobo lore by turning their old movie theater into the museum that’s there today.
My visit started with a small movie theater in the back of the museum that played documentaries about Hobo life and famous hobos. It was a good introduction to contextualize the artifacts throughout the rest of the museum, and the guy they had working the theater was very sweet:
The first exhibit I saw after the movies was dedicated to Hobo art. Some of the art was made by Hobo artists and some were just inspired by their lifestyle and culture. Unsurprisingly, trains were a particularly common motif.
Next up were some display cases filled with hobo walking sticks. More than just a practical tool for walking and balancing, these sticks were deeply personal works of art, carved and decorated to symbolize the journeys of the men and women who carried them.
Throughout the museum, there were displays dedicated to different notable hobos. The first of these I came across was dedicated to Steam Train Maury, who had about as many hobo bona fides as one person possibly can. He was born in 1917 and started riding the rails at the age of 14. For the rest of his 89 years, he would live as a hobo off and on, founding a cement masonry trade school, getting married, and writing a book about his travels when he wasn’t hopping from train to train. Maury was elected King of the Hobos at five different Hobo Conventions and, in 2004, he was given the special title of Patriarch of the Hobos. He was one of the founding members of the National Hobo Foundation, and he was instrumental in establishing the museum that is now honoring him in turn.
After paying my respects to Steam Train Maury, I made my way through a recreation Hobo Jungle, which was supposed to be pretty authentic but still looked like it was probably a sight cozier than the real thing.
Along one wall, the museum had a helpful glossary of different symbols hobos used to leave behind at different train stations or lodgings to secretly leave warnings or messages to any other hobos coming through. It was really fascinating to learn about such a deep hidden language, and the idea of traveling workers communicating in secret codes to help one another is such a fun romantic image of the past that its hard not to love.
Next up were some display cases filled with different figurines and trinkets featuring hobo iconography. It was interesting seeing how the image of a hobo has been used in such different ways throughout pop culture ranging from romanticized to derogatory. A large reason the museum exists is to challenge people’s preconceived notions of hobo-dom and to tell the true story of the under-represented history of migrant workers and unhoused people who have shaped the country. Displays like this help contextualize why it’s an important cause.
The next displays were dedicated to Hobo musicians, featuring instruments, clothes, art, and artifacts from these wandering bards. It’s hard to know just how much of an effect Hobos have had on the American musical vernacular because things were largely passed down through an oral tradition, but their role in expanding and spreading the folk musician tradition cannot be overstated.
Of course, one rail-riding musician whose astronomical impact on American music is very well recorded is Woody Guthrie, and the museum did feature both a charming photo and one of his original harmonicas. As a fan, it was a cool little treat I wasn’t expecting to just stumble across in the middle of Iowa.
Next up was more Hobo art, featuring drawings, sketches, photos, and carvings made during idle hours while traveling. While it was probably uncommon for the average hobo to have a lot of fine arts training, the creativity, skill, and craftsmanship in all of these pieces was just incredible.
Next up were some more displays about notable Hobo Kings including with multi-year winners like the Pennsylvania Kid, “Hardrock Kid” John Maslin, and of course Steam Train Maury.
Next up were some some interesting displays about the valuable Hobo skill of tying different knots and hitches. Similarly to the walking sticks, theses bits of string were more than just a practical necessity. Different bows and knots also served as symbols to leave notes or warnings to other hobos or to simply express yourself and where you’ve traveled. Some hobos became so skilled with tying intricate knots that they could make real works of art like the impressive mobile in the photo below on the right:
The next display was dedicated to images of Hobos in cartoons and comics strips which were surprisingly prevalent in the first half of the 20th century. Again images ranged from exaggerated caricatures to lovingly detailed portraits, and it was really cool to see more examples of how images of hobos permeate pop culture in different ways.
As is common in most museums, I almost forgot to look up which means I almost missed out on seeing this hilariously stern looking mannequin presiding over the museum amidst a collection of beautifully painted instruments. It was a very odd tableau, but a striking one nonetheless.
Next up were some more displays about notable hobos, including Feather River John, a hobo who became a Vermont Senator and Adviser to President Reagan (weird for a hobo to be such a staunch republican since most famous hobos lean more socialist, but I guess it takes all kinds) and Gas Can Paddy, who designed a bag that resembled an old gas because he found people were more likely to pick him him up when he was hitchhiking if they thought he was someone who had just run out of gas rather than hobo.
Up next were some examples of different sorts of Hobo craftsmanship including neat wind chimes made out of old aluminum cans and an absolutely beautiful handmade wooden chair.
Last but not least, there was a big gallery of more hobo art which featured great character work and gorgeous landscapes.
After the museum, this hobo hit the road again because it was about a two hour drive to my next delightfully quirky Iowa pitstop. This time I was heading to the small town of Spillville (awesome name) to visit the Bily Clocks Museum which is home to some of the most jaw-dropping hand-carved wooden clocks in the world by brothers Frank and Joseph Bily, as well as a few special exhibits related to the town’s predominantly Czech heritage. The museum’s current location also happens to be the home where the legendary composer Antonin Dvorak stayed while he was staying in the states in 1893, so there’s a whole lot different interesting historical threads converging on this one small town. As if to tip visitors off that this is a little spot outside of time, the first thing you see when you walk up is a large old-timey street clock in front of what you might otherwise mistake for just a regular house. It gave the museum a whimsical quality where you almost felt like you were discovering something sort of magical hidden right in plain sight.
Before looking at the museum’s signature Bily Clocks, I checked out the various upstairs gallery. This started with a gallery of smaller-scale wooden clocks from the 19th and early 20th centuries to sort of give a lay of the clock-making land around the time the Bily Brothers took up the trade. Each of these clocks was truly gorgeous, capturing both incredibly skilled craftsmanship and different stylistic trends in what people used to look for in their timepieces. It served as a great intro gallery for the museum, getting you excited for how interesting historic clocks might look while still only giving you a small taste of what the Bily Brothers were able to do.
After these introductory clocks, there were some displays of different turn of the century music players. These would have been exciting forms of entertainment for the average early Czech immigrant in Spillsville, and possibly how they might have heard the music of the great composer who once stayed in the house. Highlights for me included: an absolutely beautiful old accordion that used to belong to a Vaudeville performer; an elegant music box with detachable brass cylinders that determined what song would be played; a “monkey grinder” organ with a snazzy decorative scene of a bird perching on some branches; and some kooky smaller music boxes shaped like different figures including some that were intended to be placed on top of wedding cakes. Weird!
The musical artifacts were nicely tied to the museum’s Dvorak connection but they also just had some random artifacts from life in early Spillsville (never not a fun name to write). This included a surprisingly decorative butter churn and, perhaps most shockingly of all, a preserved two-headed pig. A local farmer’s pig gave birth to a piglet with two heads, which the farmer thought was something people would like to see. Initially, he gave this anatomical oddity to his son’s high school biology class to study, but when they were done with it he didn’t know what to do with it. In a weird Hail Mary, he asked the Bily Clocks if they wanted to put in on display and for some reason they said, “Sure, what historic clock museum would be complete without a two-headed pig?”. t’s been on display since the 1960s, and now it’s become a popular attraction to creep out and fascinate younger visitors so I guess there was a method to the madness.
Along one wall, there was a charmingly unflattering wooden bust of the two Bily boys by an artist who had been inspired by their woodworking. The actual carving is pretty fantastic, and unfortunately it’s actually pretty accurate to what the brothers looked like in their old age which makes me think they would have liked if the artist had picked a younger reference photo. The stand that the bust is on is also sort of causally stunning as well. I always like when furniture that you might not give a second look at happens to also be a great work of art.
Next up was a gallery dedicated all to Dvorak. The museum had portraits of him, letters he wrote, scores he wrote, and a few genuine articles of his including a violin and a pipe. Dvorak was an interesting figure, displaying virtuosic aptitude on violin at a young age and writing his first symphony at 24. As a young composer, he achieved a degree of success in his native Prague, but was essentially unknown in the larger classical musical world until he won the 1874 Austrian State Prize. The jurors, including a certain Johannes Brahms, were greatly impressed with the quality and sheer quantity of Dvorak’s works (for just this one submission he sent in fifteen works including two symphonies, several overtures and a song cycle). At the time he won the award, he couldn’t even afford his own piano! When he won the prize again just 2 years later with an entirely different giant submission, Brahms personally reached out to him to help get his music to a larger audience. Brahms convinced his publisher to print one of Dvorak’s pieces and it proved to be so popular he basically became an international success overnight. He toured Europe getting commissions from major orchestras, while also dealing with a considerable amount of anti-Czech bigotry from more classist, bigoted institutions. His music was unabashedly influenced by Czech and Slavic culture and many of his works were inspired by or rooted in folk songs and dances, so he wasn’t about to let this opposition stop him and he kept writing at a constant pace. In 1892, he was hired to be the director of the National Conservatory of Music in NYC. While there, he made a concerted effort to learn as much about American folk music to try to determine what the idiom of truly “American” music might be. He fell in love with Native American and African American music in particular, and he was a strong advocate of the Conservatory accepting any talented student regardless of race or gender which was sadly very uncommon at the time (one of his African American students, Will Marion Cook, went on to be a mentor to Duke Ellington, so indirectly Dvorak really did have a pretty cool influence on American music). While in America, Dvorak wrote and conducted the New World Symphony which was one of his greatest successes during his lifetime and continues to be one of his most popular and celebrated pieces.
Despite the acclaim he was finding in America, Dvorak was feeling homesick and thinking of returning to Prague. Instead, his secretary suggested he visit his hometown of Spillsville, because there was such a large Czech population there he thought it might do the trick while also offering the composer a chance to immerse himself in the American heartland. Dvorak loved the idea and took his whole family to live in Spillsville for the summer of 1893. While in Iowa, he composed his American Quartet for strings which is another of his most enduringly popular pieces, which you can listen to here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HrqgMrwG4i0&ab_channel=MichaelParloff
My favorite part of the Dvorak exhibit were these spectacular wooden pianos and organs, because they were incredible to look at in their own right but they also sort of nicely connected some thematic dots between the Bily Brothers’ woodworking and Dvorak’s music.
The next few exhibits were dedicated to various items related to the Czech ancestry of many of the town’s early immigrant population. The first display that really knocked my socks off were these teeny tiny blown glass vials, because the patterns were so intricate yet the room for error on such a small surface was so small. Sometimes going small is even more impressive than going big.
Naturally there were some more clocks, but this next section started showing off more decorative clock carving that inspired the Bily Brothers. These designs were often astonishing, but again, and I hope I’m not overhyping this, they were just a taste of what the Bilys would do.
Next up were some displays of different figurines carved from wood to show the medium’s incredible versatility. It’s really amazing how much life and character artists are able to find in simple blocks of wood.
On the more eccentric side, the next few displays contained various rocks and minerals (which were very pretty but seemed only related to the rest of the museum because they’d been donated by people around town) and a display of Czech arts and crafts featuring some really incredibly illustrated children’s books with “The Disobedient Kids” being a real stand out.
Hanging over the windows, the museum had placed some really stunning quilts inspired by traditional Czech embroidery. The needlework and attention to detail was just unbelievable.
Walking back around, I came across this delightfully wacky music player that used giant metal discs with different rivets (a very early example of the essential design of modern vinyl records) to play music while little animatronic ballerinas at the bottom would dance along. There was also a really lovely sculpture on top of the music player but I sadly have no idea what it’s story is because the text came out too blurry in my photo.
Walking down the stairwell to the main exhibit, I passed by this charming carved and painted family of dogs just hanging out. Apparently the Bily Brothers had them specially ordered from Switzerland to Iowa because they liked them so much. The dogs are really sweet (and the wood carving is very impressive) but still what a fun, weird detail!
Now that I had finished with the upstairs galleries it was time to see the Bilys’ work first hand. As just a small taste of their talents the hallway leading up to the clocks had some different wood panels they had carved which do really show off their ability to work in both expressive modes and highly detailed realist styles as well. All of their works also really show off the natural beauty of the wood itself which you can see here, but becomes even more evident with the clocks.
Without further ado, here are the absolutely mind-blowing Bily clocks! The two brothers made each of these clocks almost entirely out of wood which they carved either by hand or with special jigsaws they designed themselves. There are no screws or nails in any of the clocks and every piece is held together by glue which the brothers also made themselves. Somehow they figured out how to do all of this without any formal training! Perhaps the wildest thing about the two brothers is that even as they gained a decent amount of fame for their woodworking and clock-building, they insisted on just keeping it as a hobby. They worked as farmers and carpenters their whole lives and just made the clocks on their own time. They let visitors come in to see the clocks but they staunchly refused to sell any of them. Henry Ford even once offered them a million dollars to buy one of their clocks but they turned him down, which must have made him so confused and angry so the Bily Bros rule. Most of the clocks were built around different themes which gave the brothers new opportunities to challenge and amuse themselves and most of them feature animatronic parts and music boxes which are still functional today. For a museum with such an unassuming facade, this was truly one of those most oddly magical places I’ve encountered on my whole trip between the art, craft, and random stories that all converge here.
Part of the magic though, is seeing the clocks in motion so I definitely recommend checking out this video the museum agreed to do for the Kool Buildings YouTube channel:
Last but not least, the museum naturally also had an entire historic schoolhouse that had been donated and moved to its current location behind the main museum. The Bouska Schoolhouse had been built in 1854 to serve the Czech children of the town. It was a one room schoolhouse, but there was also one more room for the school teacher and his family to live in. That’s some insane space efficiency.
Heading out of Spillsville, I drove by a house with a carved Bavarian boy playing the tuba. It’s like this whole small town was designed to make me smile at every turn.
While this day’s adventures were really great, I had managed to stray quite aways from the Des Moines area where I was still making camp for the night. It was about a three hour drive from Spillsville back to my Air BnB, so I stopped for dinner about halfway in the cool college town of Cedar Falls. For a relatively small town, they had a pretty vibrant downtown area with lots of cool looking shops and restaurants. I opted for Pablo’s Mexican Grill which is a local favorite presumably because you get massive portions for unbelievably low prices which will always be a big hit for college students (and itinerant comedians). Even better, the food also happens to be fantastic. I got a pork burrito which featured locally raised meat marinated for hours in their house seasoning, cilantro-lime rice, black beans, cheese, and salsa all wrapped up in a massive flour tortilla (all for $6!). Throw in a side of home-made corn chips and it was really a fantastic dinner.
After dinner, I walked around the downtown area for a bit and stumbled across a local chocolate shop called Cholaterie Stam which immediately caught my eye because of its impressively elegant aesthetic, which made it look like an old European Chocolate Shop that had been transported to Northern Iowa. Interestingly this actually isn’t far off, because while the chocolate shop opened in 1997, the Stam family had previously been master chocolatiers in Holland for over 200 years before deciding to share their beautiful handiwork with the New World.
Everything in the store looked amazing, which was dangerous when on a budget, so I reigned in my impulses and just got a coconut haystack (not pictured, wasn’t long for this world) and one of their signature triple chocolate bonbons which feature a blend of white, milk, and dark chocolate for a beautiful harmonious showcase of the shop’s repertoire.
After a wonderfully quirky day, I made the rest of the 1.5 hour drive back to my Air BnB for a relaxing night of catching up on my writing and Netflix.
Favorite Random Sightings: a furniture store called Uptown Funky Junk; a warehouse for White Transfer (another name for Irish immigration); an antique store called Weekend Junk Warriors; a hilariously grandiose billboard proclaiming “Your search for batteries ends here”
Regional Observations: In my head, Iowa is a small state but now that I’ve been driving all over there’s a lot more area than I realized and it’s actually the 23rd largest state!
Random Joke of the Day: A grasshopper walks into a bar. The bartender laughs and says, "Hey, we have a drink named after you!"
The grasshopper looks at the bartender, with a look of extreme confusion on his face, and says, "You have a drink called Steve?"
Songs of the Day:
One of only two surviving clips of Woody Guthrie playing live
A gorgeously filmed clip of the Berlin philharmonic
a short video of Yo-Yo Ma being a sweetie