Burlington: Iowa's First Capital and the World's Crookedest Street

Burlington sits on a series of bluffs above the Mississippi River at a place the Mesquakie people called Shoquoquok, a gathering site where flint suitable for making tools and weapons lay close to the surface. European American settlers began arriving in eighteen thirty-three, just after the Black Hawk Purchase opened the land west of the river to non-Native homesteading. They first called the settlement Flint Hills, then renamed it Burlington after the city in Vermont that one of the early arrivals had come from.

What distinguished Burlington from the dozens of other river towns that sprang up along the upper Mississippi in the eighteen thirties was timing and geography. Wisconsin Territory was organized in eighteen thirty-six with its capital at Belmont, and the following year the territorial legislature moved to Burlington. When Congress carved Iowa out of Wisconsin Territory in eighteen thirty-eight and made it a separate territory, Burlington served as Iowa's first capital as well. The territorial legislature convened here in November of that year, meeting in a church since no official statehouse existed yet. Burlington held the distinction for about three years, until the capital was relocated to the more centrally situated Iowa City in eighteen forty-one.

The railroad arrived in the eighteen fifties, and Burlington became one of the great transfer points on the upper river, a place where goods moving west met the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy line and rolled out across the Iowa prairies. The Burlington and Missouri River Railroad pushed across the state from here in the eighteen sixties, anchoring the city's identity as a rail hub for a generation.

Today Burlington is most famous among road tourists for a single block of street. Snake Alley was constructed in eighteen ninety-four by three German immigrants who wanted to connect the commercial district at the base of Heritage Hill to the residential neighborhood above. Charles Starker, the landscape engineer, and his partners designed a curving limestone-brick path that rises more than fifty-eight feet at a twenty-one percent grade, with five half-curves and two quarter-curves packed into roughly three hundred feet of roadway. The brick was laid at an angle so horses could find footing climbing the steep slope.

Ripley's Believe It or Not declared Snake Alley the crookedest street in the world in the nineteen forties, and the designation stuck. The street was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-four. Every spring, bicycle racers come from across the country to ride it uphill in a criterium race that has become one of the most distinctive cycling events in the Midwest.