This week in Ames
- Grand opening: IE Inc.
Fri, Oct 30 · 4:30 PM · Therkildsen Industrial Engineering Building (Sukup Advanced Manufacturing Lab)
About Ames
Ames began in 1864 as a stop on the Cedar Rapids and Missouri Railroad, laid out near where the South Skunk River meets Ioway Creek, and it took its name from Oakes Ames, a Massachusetts congressman who helped push the transcontinental railroad west. The college came first, though: in 1858 the legislature founded an agricultural college and model farm here, and its 1861 Farm House still stands on a campus that taught women and men side by side from its very first class. In a physics building basement on that campus, John Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry spent 1939 to 1942 building a desk-sized machine of vacuum tubes and spinning drums that is remembered as the first electronic digital computer. Downtown, the brick storefronts of Main Street grew up beside the railroad tracks after the Civil War, and in 2018 the whole stretch joined the National Register of Historic Places. On the south edge of campus, a patch that once held grain bins, livestock pens and game-day parking became Reiman Gardens in 1995, and its glass conservatory and butterfly wing keep it blooming straight through an Iowa winter. Today the Campanile's 50 bells still ring the quarter hours, CyRide carries more riders than any bus system in the state, and families head to the trails around the lake at Ada Hayden Heritage Park.