Welcome
Tourists
Rathbun lake area
offers year-round fun
By Theresa Bjork
There isn’t a better way to start a day of shopping and sight-seeing in the Centerville area than sitting down to a pancake breakfast.
After all, Centerville is home of the annual Pancake Day. The event, celebrating its 60th anniversary on Sept. 26, is an all-day pancake feast on the historic Centerville town square.
Local residents, some of whom have flipped pancakes since the inaugural year, fire up 40 griddles and serve 60,000 pancakes for a hungry, syrup-loving crowd.
Centerville and the other small towns in the Rathbun Lake area hope the new Honey Creek Resort brings more visitors to the unique community events, shops and tourism attractions that southeast Iowa offers.
“We’ve been excited about this for a long time..., and the community really pulled together to bring the resort here,” says Joyce Bieber, director of the Centerville Chamber of Commerce. “We think people will discover there’s a little more here (in Centerville) than people expect to find.”
A group of Midwest travel writers recently visited the many tourist attractions in the Rathbun Lake region.
The first stop on the media tour was the Exline Old Country Store in the rural town of Exline, about 7 miles south of Centerville.
Walk into the country store and you’ll see an old-fashioned soda fountain and wood-burning stove. Retired farmers sit at the counter and talk weather, politics and local gossip. Regulars keep their coffee mugs on a shelf in the corner.
Morgan Cline, an Exline native who started a successful pharmaceutical advertising agency, built the Exline Old Country Store as a gathering place for locals and visitors.
Next door, visitors can step inside a restored one-room school house and a museum with an antique fire truck once used by the Exline Fire Department.
History buffs will also find a wealth of hidden gems in nearby Centerville, which is about a 20-minute drive from Honey Creek Resort.
The Centerville town square, promoted as the world's largest, spans a total of eight blocks and is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places.
Cars circle the town square over the noon hour, trying to snag a rare unoccupied parking spot. Kids zoom by on bicycles, and the locals say hello to an obvious tourist with a camera slung around her neck.
The Continental Hotel, renovated by philanthropist Morgan Cline, has anchored the Centerville town square since its construction in 1893. Today, the Continental Hotel is home to an award-winning restaurant.
Another of Cline’s restoration projects, Bradley Hall, is a 100-year-old mansion that boasts one-of-a-kind woodwork, fireplaces and stained glass windows.
More than 70 vendors sell gifts, antiques and home décor inside the Shops at Bradley Hall, which attracts more than 100 visitors a day in its busy season.
After a leisurely lunch at the Continental Hotel, the media tour stopped in Albia, located about 20 miles north of Honey Creek Resort.
The Albia's town square district has also undergone extensive renovations in recent years.
One of the most striking main-street buildings is the First Iowa State Bank office, which carries many architectural features original to the bank’s founding more than 70 years ago. The bank also houses an extensive Iowa-themed collection of paintings and sculptures from Midwest artists.
“We really welcome visitors. We really are an out-of-the-ordinary bank,” said Catherine Burkman, a First Iowa State Bank employee.
Visitors also should stop by the new Albia Ice Cream restaurant. The store, decorated in 1950s sock-hop style, has become a popular hang-out for kids and adults.
“We’ll get the men coming in early (for coffee) in the morning, and then the ladies will chase them out around 10 o’clock,” said Jennifer Alspaugh, the shop’s 17-year-old “soda jerk."
It’s hard for any tourist to resist the lure of nostalgia, shopping and pancakes.
But that’s the reward for visitors who take the time to discover what Centerville, Albia and the Rathbun Lake region have to offer.