Reed/Niland Corner

In 1923 a local farmer named Charlie Reed built a gas station on the corner of his land where the Lincoln and Jefferson highways crossed, and called it the Lincoln-Jefferson, or L and J, station. He soon added tourist cabins so travelers could sleep, and a lunch stand that grew, with the help of his nephew C. Reed Niland, into a full diner by 1926. Gas, food, and a bed on one corner: it was one of only a handful of stops on the Lincoln Highway open around the clock.

The Lincoln Highway, dedicated in 1913, was the first road planned to run all the way across the country, from New York City to San Francisco. The Jefferson Highway, laid out soon after, ran north and south from Winnipeg in Canada down to New Orleans, and boosters nicknamed it the Palm to Pine highway. Colo sat where these two crossed, and for travelers of the 1920s and 1930s the Reed/Niland Corner was a well-known landmark on both.

Over the years the corner took the shape it holds today. The station and cafe settled into their present spots around 1930, and in 1947 a proper motel replaced the old tourist cabins. Together they made the classic trio of the American road trip, and remarkably all three have survived where nearly every other Iowa one-stop was torn down or lost as the highways moved and the interstates came through.

Today the old Standard station is kept as a museum of early auto travel, no longer selling fuel but preserving the look and feel of a Depression-era filling station. Niland's Cafe still serves travelers in a dining room full of highway memorabilia, complete with a vintage car nosing in from one wall, and is known for its home cooking and homemade pies. The motel still takes overnight guests, so you can genuinely eat and sleep at the crossroads the way road trippers did generations ago.

By the late twentieth century the corner might easily have been lost. Instead, the Niland family gifted the property to the City of Colo in 1995, and the community set about saving it. A major restoration, paid for largely with state and federal highway enhancement grants and local donations, brought the station and cafe back to life in the early 2000s and finished the motel a few years later.

The work has continued into recent years, with a new nonprofit formed to own and care for the whole corner and county support to help maintain it. Its national importance is being formally recognized as well, with a nomination underway to add the corner to the National Register of Historic Places. It is, in the truest sense, a place a small Iowa town chose to keep, so that the story of the crossroads would not disappear.

The corner is easy to find in the middle of Colo, just off modern U.S. 30, the highway that follows the old Lincoln Highway route across Iowa, and a short drive east of Ames and Nevada. It makes a natural break on a cross-state drive: stretch your legs, look through the station museum, and have a meal and a slice of pie in the diner.

Because it is a small-town stop rather than a sprawling attraction, a visit is relaxed and quick, though the history rewards a slower look. The gas station museum keeps seasonal hours and the diner and motel run on their own schedules, so it is worth checking ahead if you are making a special trip. Every visit and every meal helps the town keep the last complete one-stop on the Lincoln Highway alive.

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