Bily Clocks Museum

Frank and Joseph Bily were farmers of Czech descent who lived and worked near Spillville in the early twentieth century. Self-taught carvers, they turned to woodworking in the winter months when farm work slowed, and over decades they produced a series of clocks that grew ever more ambitious, some standing taller than a person and covered in hundreds of hand-carved figures.

Their masterpieces include clocks celebrating American pioneer history, the story of aviation, and religious themes such as the Apostles' Parade, in which carved figures emerge and process on the hour. The brothers made these works purely for the love of the craft, not for sale, and they famously turned down large offers, choosing instead to keep the collection together and eventually give it to the town of Spillville.

The building that houses the clocks has a second claim to fame. In the summer of 1893 the Czech composer Antonin Dvorak, then living in the United States, came to Spillville to spend a season among fellow Czech immigrants, and he lodged in a room on the upper floor of this very building. He had recently completed his New World Symphony, and in Spillville he composed chamber works while walking the banks of the Turkey River.

That a composer of Dvorak's stature spent a creative summer in a tiny Iowa town speaks to how strong the Czech immigrant community was here. The museum preserves and interprets his rooms upstairs, so a visit connects two very different kinds of artistry, the folk carving of the Bily brothers below and the classical music of Dvorak above, both rooted in the same Czech heritage.

Spillville was settled in the 1850s by Czech immigrants drawn to the wooded hills and fertile valleys of northeast Iowa, and it remains one of the most distinctly Czech towns in the state. Its old church, its cemetery, and its family names all reflect that heritage, and the town takes quiet pride in its music, its faith, and its craft traditions.

The surrounding landscape is the Driftless Area, a region the last glaciers missed, leaving a rumpled country of steep hills, rocky bluffs, cold trout streams, and deep valleys unlike the flat prairie most people picture in Iowa. The Turkey River flows through Spillville, and the whole area rewards a slow drive along its back roads and river valleys.

The Driftless country of northeast Iowa is the ancestral homeland of the Ho-Chunk, the Meskwaki, and the Sauk peoples, along with the Ioway, for whom the state is named, who lived and traveled through these valleys and along the rivers. Their descendants remain part of the region's living Native communities today.

The steep, spring-fed valleys of the Driftless drew successive peoples for their game, fish, and shelter, and the ancient mound-building traditions of the upper Mississippi reach into this corner of Iowa. The Czech settlers who founded Spillville came to a landscape already rich in deep human history, and a visit to the region takes in both its immigrant heritage and its far older Native roots.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.