Report on the Iowa Twenty-Five Year Conservation Plan
By Vance Polton
This Report was always going to be part of Wayback Wednesday. You really couldn't do our history justice without it. People in our bureau know what you are talking about when you say the "Twenty-Five Year Conservation Plan" even if they have never seen a copy of it let alone read it. But how could I do it justice? How do you explain what it meant to the formation of who and what we are? Who and what our entire division is? How big of an endeavour the project back in the early 1930's was? Mr. Crane, the planning consultant from Chicago hired to put it all together said that there were no less than one thousand individuals involved in the project.
Who is Mr. Crane? you might ask. Jacob Leslie Crane Jr (1892-1988). was born in 1892 in Benzonia Michigan. He received a degree in civil engineering from the University of Michigan and a planning degree from Harvard University in 1921. He went on to establish a business in Municipal Development and Planning in Chicago, from there he did consultant work across the United States and twenty-five other countries. He prepared 60 sets of zoning plans and served as an expert witness in many zoning cases. He consulted for the TVA, the United Nations, The United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and in Panama he was a consultant for the design and development of the Canal Zone around the Panama Canal.
Let's face it, he knew what he was doing when it came to planning and organizing.
How could I talk about and explain what it took all those people to develop?
I finally decided, "I'm going to Cop Out". I'm going to let Jacob Leslie Crane Jr. do all the heavy lifting on this one. He wrote it; Let him explain its preparation, its magnitude, what it was meant to do; and the problems they faced back then (many of them we still face today). The Plan itself will handle the rest. Attached below are three items. The first "Preparation of the Iowa Conservation Plan" was written by Mr. Crane for the American Civic Annual (journal) volume IV: pages 140-143 in 1932. The second is a letter written by Crane back in 1931 to the newly formed Iowa Fish and Game Commission about his thoughts on how the Fish and Game Department should be organized. (I retyped this letter, the "file copy" I have was typed on onion paper and some of the ink has flaked off and faded making it a little hard to read.) And finally a digital copy of the "Report on the Iowa Twenty-Five Year Conservation Plan"
Finding a printed copy of the Conservation Plan is getting very hard to do and when you do most of the time you are looking at paying well over $100 for a decent copy. Finding a digital copy is far from easy although it is getting easier. The digital versions I have been able to find have all been digitally compressed and as they used many obscure fonts and typesets back when they printed the original, the digital compression has turned many of these into complete gibberish. I spent a fair amount of time with my printed copy beside my computer monitor straightening out the copy I have attached.
