Rural History Bus Tour Starts In Iowa

Des Moines Register:

This landscape — apart from the water sport of the 11-mile-long Lake Red Rock or the quaint Dutch facades of Pella — offers the rural Iowa staples of combines, pickup trucks, convenience stores and water towers. It’s not exactly a tourist magnet.
Or could it be?
Charlotte Shivvers stood at the front of the bus with a microphone and gestured to a deserted farmstead out the windows, calling it a “marker of the biggest historical change in rural Iowa in the last 100 years” — namely depopulation.
This year also marks the 150th anniversary of the Homestead Act, she added, when President Lincoln granted 160 acres of farmland to those willing to till the soil.
Instead of a large brood of burly farm kids, most rural families today tend to raise just a couple of children, she said, “both of whom probably go to California to work on computers.”
Your tour guide, Shiv-vers, 77, is the energetic president of a new group known as the Rural History Buffs of Marion County.“It’s as if we hear a heartbeat,” she said of how the fledgling nonprofit’s mission to “mark the hidden history of rural Marion County” has been embraced by their neighbors.
Welcome to a new frontier in grass-roots tourism, one that blends historical preservation, local genealogy and the sort of idiosyncratic place names that served as a low-tech GPS in the bygone era before smartphones.

I'm a big fan of the lost history of rural areas, and I hate to see so much history die off with the passing of elderly folks, but riding around in the sticks with a busload of old people doesn't look like something I'd want to do on a day off.  Really, every county in the country could be doing this, but the quality of the tour would only be as good as the guide.