Sterzing's Potato Chips Iowa Made In Burlington

Burlington, Iowa.Mid-1930s. The country’s in the middle of the Great Depression. Money is tight. Businesses are failing.

Barney Sterzing is trying to sell candy.

It’s not going well.Heat melts the product. People aren’t buying sweets. Sugar costs too much. Something has to change.

So he pivots.

Potatoes are cheap. Oil is cheap. Salt is cheap.

He slices potatoes thin. Drops them into hot oil. Lets them cook slow. Pulls them out crisp. Tosses on salt.

That’s it. No flavors. No tricks. Just chips. And people buy them.

Then World War II hits. Sugar gets rationed. Candy is done. Completely done.

Great Burlington Ice Cream Heist of 1914

Boys stealing tastes of ice cream on the heat-soaked riverfront

The Great Ice Cream Heist of Burlington didn’t look like a crime wave at first. It slid in slow and sticky, the way trouble sneaks into river towns when the heat gets mean and people get stupid. By July 1914, Burlington was staggering through one of those summers when the Mississippi smelled like dead fish and everyone walked around half-dizzy. Tempers thinned. Judgment wilted. That’s when strange things start moving in the dark.

The Burlington Ice Cream Company started losing tubs off their wagons. Not a pint here or there—five-gallon buckets. At first, it looked like sloppy bookkeeping or a hungry stray. Then the numbers piled up. Fifteen gallons went on Tuesday. Thirty on Thursday. By August, someone had hauled off hundreds of gallons. The Burlington Hawk-Eye called the culprits “ice cream fiends,” adding that “whole tubs vanish nightly.” Another line warned that the city was “plagued by a youthful gang whose appetite exceeds their morals.”

Burlington County Poor House

It stood like a castle or medieval fortress on the edge of town, except no one went there willingly.

The Burlington county poorhouse served as Des Moines County’s refuge for the poor, sick, and elderly. Locals called it the “county home” or “poor farm.” Every county had one back then.

It was a working farm where residents, if able, helped raise crops, tend animals, and kept the place running. The steward and matron lived on-site, managing the chores and caring for dozens of “inmates,” as census records coldly described them.

County funds kept the operation going, with a doctor visiting regularly and local officials inspecting the grounds. Life there was simple and sometimes harsh, but it offered shelter to those with nowhere else to go.

A small cemetery nearby held the graves of those who died without family. Like other poorhouses across Iowa, Burlington’s stood as both a symbol of compassion and a reminder of hard times.

Goodrich Hotel Council Bluffs Iowa

The Goodrich Hotel stood at 8th and Broadway in Council Bluffs, built by local businessman Walter S. Goodrich. For years, it was one of the city’s best places to stay—solid, respectable, and busy with travelers coming off the trains.

A fire in March 1922 lit up the downtown skyline. Firefighters saved the building, though the damage left scars that never fully healed. The hotel reopened but never quite regained its old polish.

By the 1970s, the Goodrich had shifted from hotel to low-rent apartments. The building was sold in the early 1980s, and talk of demolition followed, possibly to make way for a parking lot.

Lucinda The Phantom of Stony Hollow Road

Lucinda waiting on the bluff. Ready to jump
into legend? Maybe.

Out past Burlington, where the cornfields turn to limestone and the road hums under your tires, lies Stony Hollow Road. Quiet, crooked, and empty. A place where headlights vanish faster than they should and the night feels heavier than it ought to. Locals say a woman named Lucinda still waits there—though for what, no one’s sure anymore.

The story is simple and mean. She was supposed to meet her lover at the bluff. He never came. Maybe he got stuck in the mud. Maybe he never planned to show. She waited, heart cracking open, then stepped off the edge. No records. No obituary. Just a story that settled in the dirt and refused to leave.

If you stop there after midnight and say her name three times—“Lucinda, Lucinda, Lucinda”—she’s supposed to appear on the cliff, pale and silent. Yeah! It sounds like Beetlejuice, but Lucinda was there first, so who’s copying whom?