Founded in the 1850s to protect settlers from roving bands of Sauk and Black Hawk Indians, Fort Dodge is today a sleepy Midwestern town, economically dependent upon local farms, gypsum wallboard plants, and a huge Friskies cat food factory. Amid many stately homes on the south side of downtown, one place really worth a look is the Blanden Memorial Art Museum (closed Mon.; free), at 920 3rd Avenue South. Housed inside a grand neoclassical 1930s building, the collections include examples of pre-Columbian pottery, Renaissance sculpture, and Japanese prints. Modern paintings include works by people you wouldn’t expect to find in the middle of Iowa—Max Beckmann, Marc Chagall, and Rufino Tamayo, to name three—along with works by Grant Wood and other Iowa artists.
The famous Cardiff Giant, a seven-foot-tall skeleton supposedly unearthed in New York in 1868, was thought by experts to be the bones of a prehistoric man. However, the skeleton, which was kept on prominent display by showman P. T. Barnum for the next 35 years, was later proven to be a hoax, carved from a slab of gypsum quarried at Fort Dodge. A replica is on display at the Fort Museum and Frontier Village ($6) on US-20.
