A fiberglass strawberry 15 feet tall and 12 feet wide, weighing about 1,400 pounds, sits on a pole in front of the city hall of Strawberry Point, Iowa, where Iowa Highways 3 and 13 share Commercial Street. It was hoisted into place on 20 June 1967. About five months later a windstorm snapped the pole and smashed the berry, and it was repaired and re-erected in the spring of 1968. The berry was fabricated in California, shipped to a Dubuque sign company and assembled in town, and the money was raised by residents. In February 2025 it came down for its first full restoration in decades, was sanded, patched and repainted by a firm that normally paints water towers, and went back up on 16 April 2025, after the city had spent seven weeks circulating missing posters for it. The town's name is older than the town. In 1841 a military survey party laying out the Old Mission Road from Dubuque to Fort Atkinson camped at a spring in a wedge shaped point of timber thick with wild strawberries, and the name went into the survey. When W. H. and D. M. Stearns platted a settlement there in 1853 they wanted to call it Franklin, but that name was taken. The railroad station of 1872 was briefly named Endfield, until an 1875 state law required a station to carry the name of its town, and Strawberry Point was incorporated in 1887. The strawberry is the town's one large landmark, and it appears on the water tower too, repainted in 2024 with a berry on the north and south faces.
Getting there
42.6827, -91.5347
Locations are approximate and may be inaccurate, on private land, or otherwise inaccessible. Check before you travel.
Hear it from the road
Whistlestop tells you this story automatically when you drive past. No searching, no tapping, nothing to ask.
