Those of you who’ve lived here a little while will recognize the name Seniom-Sed but the name actually goes back way earlier than most people know.

Seni-Om-Sed used to be one of the biggest parties around. People would come from all over Iowa to attend the festivities. The festival started in conjunction with the State Fair. At the time the fair was entirely agricultural, without all the entertainment options that are part of it now. After the sun went down, so did the fair. So the Des Moines Commerce Exchange (what is now the Greater Des Moines Partnership) founded a festival to take place during the fair. This would happen both at night and during the day. They created a fictional king called King Seni-Om-Sed to rule over the proceedings. There were daily parades and massive fireworks exhibitions at night. And people came in droves. The 1890 festival drew a little over 85,000 people.

What began in cooperation with the state fair quickly turned into a competition. The fair had moved to its current location on the east side and Seni-Om-Sed became the West side’s festival. There were angry allegations that one side of the river was giving more to the festivities. There was a call to do separate activities on either side of the river, which thankfully didn’t pass. The problem quickly became that some of the parades held during the day, were pulling crowds away from the fair. It was struggling. In response, the fair started adding new entertainment. They contracted with one of the pyrotechnic companies that had done some of the Seni-Om-Sed displays to put on ones at the fairgrounds instead. In 1898 the Paine Pyrotechnics company put on The Battle of Manilla at Seni-Om-Sed. Two years later they were putting on gigantic displays for the Fairgrounds. In many ways the competition made the fair what it is today. The parade is a direct offshoot of the various parades that were part of the festival.

That said it was still a citywide event. Advertisements in the paper were calling for all houses on the parade routes to decorate. Businesses were quick to capitalize on the need and offer their services. The event shut down a large section of the downtown area, and included the creation of a large welcome gate. Both Walnut and Locust were closed. The parades, often several over the course of the week, ran for a mile to two miles through the city.

There are a few notable stories that have come out of Seni-Om-Sed.

William Morrison’s electric car

The first electric car was invented here in Des Moines and debuted at a Seni-Om-Sed parade in 1890. Invented by William Morrison the car could run for 100 miles on a single charge. Morrison was a battery inventor and mostly focused on those, but he knew that he needed to provide people with an example of what the batteries could do. Morrison’s car used 24 batteries hidden under the seats. It had a top speed of about 8 miles per hour. For most Des Moineans, this would be the first horseless carriage they would see.

Handy the Elephant

There was an elephant in Davenport. It had been given to the Davenport Malting Company to settle a claim it had against a traveling circus. I want to know more about this story. The elephant lived large on beer and liver sausage. It carried materials for the brewers that would injure the horses or mules that worked there. It was lent to the carnival in 1898 by the brewing company and arrived by train to great fanfare. It was there to lead the Burlesque parade. It sadly didn’t get the same fare as at home, having to make do with water and hay. It’s unknown what happened to Handy after the carnival. It's thought it returned to Davenport to finish the rest of its days at the brewery.

Vicksburg Extravaganza

One of the major events that occurred with the carnival were the fireworks displays at night put on by the Paine Pyrotechnic Company out of Chicago. I had mentioned the one earlier that was meant to showcase the Battle of Manilla. That drew tens of thousands and included not only fireworks but costumed soldiers as well and ships. The whole extravaganza cost $5,000 in 1890 money. That works out to about $155,000 in today’s money. In 1897 the carnival put on a show to imitate the Siege of Vicksburg. About 60,000 attended, in comparison to the State Fair, which only drew 20,000 that day. The siege took place on the river and included boats, and

Revival

In 1979 the Des Moines Jaycees started offering an after work party downtown at Nollen Plaza and they reclaimed the name with a twist. This was Seniom Sed, to differentiate it from the earlier festival. The Friday night beer and music fest ran from 1979 to 2002 during the summer months. At times it would bring up to 2,000 to 3,000 people to the plaza. Generally described as a meat market it was well attended by young professionals who worked downtown. It was so successful that the suburbs decided to create their own. By 2002, festivals like Clive after 5 and Function in the Junction were bringing people to the suburbs instead. At the end there were only 100 or so people attending and the festival was shut down.

Interested in the name? For those of you who haven’t guessed, it’s Des Moines spelled backwards.

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In 1943, Alfred Lawson, former professional baseball player, manager, and owner, aviation pioneer, and more recently economic philosopher, purchased the six buildings and 14 acre grounds of the former University of Des Moines campus (closed since 1929) for $80,000. The newly created University of Lawsonomy opened that fall with 70 students, who grew vegetables (part of the Lawsonian philosophy was a vegetarian diet, often eaten raw), and studied a curriculum based on the works of Alfred Lawson (around 50 books and numerous articles and pamphlets), covering subjects such as physiology, metaphysics, spirituality, theology, health, physics, economics, and the history of aircraft. A degree certifying the holder as a ‘knowlegian’ could take 30 years or more to achieve.

Who was Alfred Lawson? That is a question with many answers. He was born in London, England in 1869, and was first noted as a promising minor-league baseball player in the United States in the 1880s. However, his first (and only) major-league season as a pitcher in 1890 ended quickly and ignominiously with no wins and no hits. With this end to his career as a player, he moved into managing teams and players, assembling teams that played in Cuba, Europe, and Australia. Eventually he owned some of these teams himself, which gave him the room to try some new ideas of his own. During the early 1900s, he experimented with various innovations, trying out electric lights for night games and scheduling games between white teams and black teams.

However, by the late 1900s his fertile imagination had been captured by something else: powered flight. In 1908 he founded a magazine titled “Fly” – the first magazine devoted specifically to airplanes. He later changed the title to “Aircraft”, and in fact this coined the word. He became a pioneer in aviation himself, eventually designing and building what some argue was the first passenger airplane in 1919 and popularizing the word ‘airline’. His airliner carried 18 people, had a projector onboard to show in-flight movies, and made a flight from Milwaukee to Chicago to a farm outside of Toledo and to Cleveland, then on to Buffalo, New York City, and Washington, D.C. Perhaps because of a few crash landings on this initial journey, and the fact that his next (26 passenger) airliner crashed on its very first test flight in 1921, Lawson Airlines never really took off, and went bankrupt by 1922.

After this disappointment, Lawson began to write more about his ideas and philosophies, starting with a book titled “Manlife” in 1923. This and many other later books and articles received only minor interest until 1931, when the Great Depression brought attention to his economic philosophies. Lawson declared he would spend the rest of his life propertyless and moneyless. He started the Direct Credits Society in 1931, publishing his own newspaper and pamphlets, and two years later it was among the more popular movements in the country, especially in the Midwest. Thousands attended his speeches in Detroit and Chicago in the mid-1930s, despite them not being publicized in any mainstream media, and Lawson’s followers staged parades complete with marching bands, specially written songs, and snappy white uniforms. The slogan of his Direct Credits Society was “Justice for Everybody Harms Nobody”, and his opposition to interest charges certainly had great appeal during the hardest years of the Depression – even if much of the rest of his writings and speeches were obscure and difficult to understand, including his ideas about good and evil microbes he called ‘menorgs’ and ‘disorgs’, the principles of zig-zag-and-swirl, discussions of six dimensions, and the ‘Law of Penetrability’.

When the United States entered World War II, however, Lawson’s utopian sentiments and bizarre ideas lost appeal rapidly. In 1943, when Lawson University opened its doors, he had only 70 students – a far cry from the thousands of followers he had led just a few years earlier (though he would still claim to have 2000 students). In 1948, the tax assessor of Des Moines inspected the site and concluded that it was “a university in name only” and was better described as “a colony for a community within the community for the purpose of eulogizing Alfred Lawson”. In the aftermath of WWII, Lawson also took the opportunity offered to educational institutions to buy up war surplus machine tools. However, instead of using them for educational purposes, he ran a discreet side hustle selling some of this equipment off to private buyers within the US. This, of course, was not an activity allowed for a non-profit university who had been sold government property for pennies on the dollar, expecting it to be used for training students. In 1952, this resulted in the now almost completely delusional Alfred Lawson being brought before a US Senate Investigative Committee where instead of protesting his innocence or seeking a plea deal, he used his time before the senators to try to explain Lawsonian religion and philosophy to them. They reacted with a mixture of amusement and irritation, and had the IRS revoke the nonprofit status given the university by the state, demanding it pay back taxes. In response, Lawson closed the school. Shortly thereafter, in 1954, Alfred Lawson died.

A few years later, in 1957, a former student and follower named Merle Hayden reopened the University of Lawsonomy on a farm outside Racine, Wisconsin. This property had previously been the University of Lawsonomy Farm, and now formed the whole of the campus. The university operated in this location with no tuition or fees (and very few students) until 2017, when Merle Hayden, the last Lawsonian, died.

The Des Moines site of the University of Lawsonomy, at 2nd and Euclid in Highland Park, is now occupied by the Park Fair Mall.

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The 81 acre lot to the west of Des Moines that would become Greenwood Park had begun to be developed as a private park by the original owner, T.E. Brown – believing that the location and the landscape was perfect for a park, he had cleared the undergrowth, built roads, and dammed up a creek to create a lake, all at his own expense. The city purchased this land after his death as part of a larger program to acquire land for parks as Des Moines expanded rapidly. Because this particular land had already been prepared and landscaped as a park, it was the first of these acquisitions to open to the public, in 1894.

The early work on the property had created the basics of an appealing public park, but the parks commission had many more improvements in mind. They drilled a 2500 foot deep artesian well in 1895, and then raised the level of the lake by three feet in 1897. In 1901, they adopted a landscaping plan submitted by Nelson’s of Chicago, a respected firm responsible for many other major parks around the country, such as Lincoln Park in Chicago. This plan included a pavilion, opened in 1909.

In the early 1900s, the park was also home to a herd of elk, as well as a small herd of bison – these were popular for photos and postcards of the time. Canoeing and fishing on the lake were popular activities, and the site was a favorite for picnics. Over the years, many more features were added: an adjoining lot was donated to the city in 1924 and named Ashworth Park. By 1926, the city built and opened Ashworth pool close to the edge of Greenwood Park, adding to the recreation options. In 1931, the Sylvan Theater opened, and the Rose Garden was added in 1933. The Des Moines Art Center was built in the park in 1948.

The park now includes public trails, a spray paint area, and kids play area as well as most of the original features – though not the elk and bison!

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At the end of the 19th century, technology was on the move - literally. After the emergence and dominance of railroads in the middle of the 19th century, the next major transportation revolution was smaller-scale, and much more personal. The initial invention of the bicycle in 1866, and its first brief burst of popularity as a fad on the east coast of America during the fall and winter of 1868-69, had almost no impact in the then-new city of Des Moines, far to the west. However, the high wheel bicycles of the 1880s began to interest and engage its citizens, and by the 1890s the safety bicycle took hold in Des Moines, as it did everywhere in America, in what has been called the “Bicycle Boom”.

In the 1880s, the high-wheel bicycle (or ‘ordinary bicycle’, as they were called at the time) was state-of-the-art transportation technology. They were exquisitely and precisely made, showcasing the new technologies of ball-bearings, electroplated metals, and lightweight steel alloys. They were expensive, showy, and usually owned and operated by the young, well-off members of the middle class. The Iowa Wheelmen during the high-wheel era were a small, but very visible riding club. The high riding position on an ordinary bicycle was more familiar to people of the time, since it closely approximates the height of a rider on a horse. Despite this, the bicycles certainly attracted attention everywhere they went, and the machines were widely admired for their smooth, quiet, efficient operation – the epitome of modern technology. People at the time were amazed by the distances that cyclists could cover under their own power, and races were frequently held in Iowa (and elsewhere) pitting cyclists against horse-riders. The cyclists often won, especially over longer distances.

During the 1880s, women rode high-wheel tricycles, which better accommodated women’s fashions. The influence of female riders was important in the early development of cycle touring as a pastime, and women set their own speed and distance records too.

In the early 1890s, the invention of the pneumatic tire made a new style of bicycle popular, called the ‘safety’. This is recognizable as a modern bicycle, and its lower cost, less intimidating design, and easier ride made it an immediate hit. By 1896, at the height of the boom, a large percentage of the population were riding bikes. There was an entire page of the newspaper devoted to cycling in the summer of 1896, and bicycles were used for commuting, racing, touring, courting, and picnics, to give just a few examples. Besides regular people's riding activities, bicycle racing was a major spectator sport, and numerous cycling-related products were available everywhere.

36 bicycle brands were made and distributed in Iowa during the 1890s, three of them in Des Moines. The most prominent of these was the Kenyon Bicycle Manufacturing Company, founded in 1891 and initially located at 205 6th Avenue. The company changed hands a couple of times, changing its name to the Pacemaker Bicycle Manufacturing Company, and then back to the Kenyon-Cooper Bicycle Company. Under this name in 1896 the company had a factory located at 818/820 Grand Avenue, and a retail location at 805 Locust. Because of their commitment to building very high quality bicycles, combined with their attempts to price them low enough to get market share, the company was one of the very few bicycle companies to go bankrupt at the height of the bicycle boom. It reorganized afterwards and kept going through the early 1900s.

After 1896, the bicycle boom faded, and cycling was no longer central to culture and technology the way it had been just a few years before. Wealthy consumers focused on conspicuous consumption purchased automobiles and motorcycles, and the racers mostly followed along to these new machines. However, cycling proved to be extremely important to the development of further transportation technology - almost all early automobiles used bicycle patents and concepts for various parts (differential, rack and pinion steering, bearing designs, etc.), and, famously, Orville and Wilbur Wright were bicycle mechanics before they moved on to building airplanes.

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Whether they wanted to check out books about dinosaurs, listen to the strum of a guitar played by a library staff member, or simply get a break from the summer heat, Des Moines citizens flocked to the library’s bookmobiles. What began in 1937 as a trailer full of library materials has evolved and changed throughout the decades to bring library access to the people of Des Moines when they can’t make it to the physical buildings.

Outreach vehicles have been a mainstay of the Des Moines Public Library for 85 years. Beginning in 1937, a trailer fitted with shelves of books visited neighborhood gatherings twice a week. This trailer appeared at anything from elementary schools to community buildings, even offices and city playgrounds.

In 1946, the first true mobile library was created from a refurbished federal ordnance plant bus, and by 1958, a fleet of three thirty-five-foot, air-conditioned libraries on wheels were traversing the Des Moines neighborhoods. Each bookmobile held around 4,200 books, and in 1963 alone, nearly 323,00 books were circulated through the bookmobile program accounting for 25% of the total library circulation and 36% of youth circulation.

Unfortunately, the last of these bookmobiles ceased operation in Des Moines by 1981 due to budget constraints and the construction of more physical branches. The bookmobiles were sold and repurposed. One bookmobile was sold to the Sioux City Library, one to the City of Des Moines police department as a crime prevention unit, and one sent by the Des Moines Sister City commission to Naulcalpan, Mexico.

As bookmobiles were being phased out, other outreach vehicles took their place. The Wee Pals Outreach Bookmobile began its route in 1971. With a cartoon cast of characters painted on the side by Morrie Turner, the Wee Pals bookmobile visited preschools and community centers throughout the city bringing programs to citizens who couldn’t make it to the physical buildings. By 1973, the Wee Pals bookmobile was replaced with Rosie, the multi-media outreach van. The Rosie van was packed with books, movies, projectors, and storytelling props and made over 150 visits per month to community centers, senior citizens residences, the Polk County jail, and other locations to provide free material from the library. Another van, known as Carrie, was used to transport individuals and groups to the Mid-City Library. It was a yellow fourteen-passenger van. You couldn’t miss it.

Though the Carrie van is no longer in service, an iteration of the Rosie van is still running. It even got a major renovation in 2021 and is back on the road now.

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Des Moines was one of many locations in Iowa affected by record flooding during the summer of 1993. Heavy snows earlier in the year, followed by a series of major rainstorms in the summer, led to higher water levels than were predicted by the National Weather Service.

By Saturday, July 10th, the Raccoon River was reaching levels of 23 feet, finally topping out over 25 feet early on Sunday morning. These unexpected flood levels caught the Des Moines Waterworks off guard – left out of the city’s flood planning, they had made their own arrangements, which were based on the National Weather Service’s unfortunately incorrect predictions. When the river topped their levee and water began to enter the water plant at 1am on Sunday morning, July 12th, they were forced to turn off the power and shut down the plant. The flooding of the waterworks left more than 250,000 Des Moines residents without water, while more than 40,000 were without power.

In the aftermath, the entire state was declared a disaster area, and the drinking water situation in Des Moines lasted until July 30th. The Des Moines Register offices and printing equipment were affected by the flood, and the paper was printed using the equipment at the offices of the Wall Street Journal in West Des Moines for the duration of the crisis. As they reported on Monday, July 12th, "The unprecedented extent of flooding and the magnitude of the damage left no area of central Iowa unaffected. Traffic was paralyzed, commerce was reduced to a standstill and basements were flooded. The most basic of human tasks were rendered impossible. For most residents of central Iowa, life [on] Sunday boiled down to two goals: finding safe water and regaining electrical service."

The flooding also damaged more than 40 bridges, and temporarily closed sections of interstate 35 and 80. Des Moines residents canoed through the streets and the old Des Moines Public Library main branch, located directly on the riverbank, had to have 18 truckloads of water pumped out of its basement during the cleanup. All of the books had to be hand-carried above the flood water.

The flood of 1993 was the largest to date for the Raccoon River basin, surpassing the floods of 1947, 1958, and 1979.  Over 10,000 people were evacuated from their homes and 21,000 homes were damaged - many of them destroyed. During the summer of 1993 some locations saw rain each day for 130 consecutive days. Some areas flooded more than 5 times. Agricultural yields dropped by 62 percent. The submergence and shutdown of the waterworks made the disaster particularly difficult for Des Moines residents, and the cost of the damages was estimated to be over $3.2 billion.  As newspapers of the time said, "this type of natural disaster happens very, very rarely."

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Union Park was established in 1894 as one of Des Moines’s first parks. Originally comprised of 27 acres, the park boasted an aviary, pavilion, stone fountain, and greenhouse when it first opened.

Prior to becoming a park, the land was part of the Thompson estate and held the first frame house erected in Polk County. The Thompson Homestead was built in the 1840s by Andrew Thompson and would eventually be painted by American Gothic artist Grant Wood in the 1920s not long before it was torn down.

Union Park has grown over the years, eventually expanding to 51 acres and adding notable features like the Rocket Slide in the 1970s and the Heritage Carousel in 1998. Today the park includes a formal gardens, playground, tennis and basketball courts, and much more.

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George C. Baker of Polk City, Iowa, invented Baker Barbed Wire, manufactured it in Des Moines, and before too long it was the world’s largest manufacturer of barbed wire.

Barbed wire was a significant revolution for farmers. Prior to the use of barbed wire, fences were made from hand split oak rails or by trimming an Osage Orange hedge. But certainly the contribution of barbed wire to American agriculture is most noticeable in the open prairie ranges of the west.The lifestyle of the cowboy was ended by barbed wire.

The Baker Wire Company covered the whole square block from First and Second and from Vine to Market. The company operated 20 barbing machines for 10 hours a day, 6 days a week. They paid the laborers $1.50 a day. The first real labor dispute in Des Moines occurred at the Baker Wire plant.

In the 1870’s the concept of labor unions were spreading around the country. One such union was the Knights of Labor. Baker Wire let the employees know that this was something they were not to become involved with. However, they did, and when they showed up for work on Monday morning after a meeting they were fired.

The Knights of Labor rose to the defense of the workers, solicited the support of the farmers' Grange, and created a boycott of Baker wire. After a couple of months the dealers of Baker Wire started shipping the barbed wire back because no one would buy it. The company reconsidered its position, restored the men to their jobs, and business resumed. Baker Wire Company was eventually sold and moved out of the state.

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On January 4, 1904 the Capitol Building caught fire. According to an article in the Des Moines Register and Leader the House Legislative Chamber and adjacent rooms were gutted by the fire. The cause of the fire was unknown at the time the article was written. The total loss from the fire was estimated at between $300,000 and $500,000.

The following timeline of the fire appeared in the Des Moines Register and Leader on January 5, 1904.

• 11:00 a.m.-First fire alarm.
• 11:10 a.m.-Call for more hose.
• 11:40 a.m.-General alarm.
• 1:00 p.m.-Fire had reached extreme south end of chamber roof and Chief Burnett said the building was doomed.
• 1:15 p.m.-Fire broke through the partition separating main gallery from dome passage.
• 1:45 p.m.-Fire reached the partition separating the main hall from library and orders given by Governor Cummins to have books removed.
• 2:00 p.m.-Sky lights began to fall and chandeliers with great crash.
• 2:15 p.m.-Orders given to keep people from under dome for fear fire had eaten into it and would cause it to fall.
• 2:30 p.m.-Third line of hose laid to upper south gallery and communication cut off from dome.
• 2:45 p.m.-Chief Burnett said danger was over if the fire did not eat through the holes in partitions on south side.
• 3:00 p.m.-Chief Burnett and Assistant Chief Taylor agree that the blaze is under control.
• 6:00 p.m.-Executive council met to consider plan as to session of legislature. 

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Much debate has been held over where the first night professional baseball game was played. In the late 1920s, minor league baseball attendance was slowly declining and night baseball was viewed as a way to rejuvenate interest in the sport.

Historian Larry D. Bowman says, “What began as a survival strategy in minor league towns inadvertently developed into a low-key race to determine whether Des Moines, Iowa, or Independence, Kansas, was to be the birthplace of a new era in professional baseball.

Though it has been widely believed that the first night professional baseball game under lights was played in Des Moines on May 2, 1930, it appears that this is not entirely accurate. The Des Moines Demons did indeed play the first game under permanent lights on that date at the Western League Park at Sixth and Holcomb. However, the Independence (Kansas) Producers of the Class D Western Association was the first professional ball team to play under artificial lights, thus depriving Des Moines of the distinction. The Producers Played the Muskogee Chiefs on the night of April 28, 1930, on a lighted ball field. In addition, they played two exhibition games against the House of David Ball Team on April 17 and 18.

Bowman notes that the Kansas City Monarchs of the National Negro League played a night game on April 28, in Enid, Oklahoma. The Monarchs played under a mounted portable lighting system that lit up the field for night games.

Bowman also argues in his article that the Producers played under permanent lights. Even though the Producers played under lights first, Des Moines was the first to have them installed and they were much larger.

The Demons’ Owner, E. Lee Keyser was a very savvy and determined marketer of the Des Moines opening game and made Des Moines’ opening night under the lights a national success. Baseball commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis attended, the last half of the game was broadcast nationwide on NBC radio, and 12,000 people were in attendance, instead of the normal 600. Even if Des Moines wasn't the first under the lights, it is the most famous and made an enormous impact on the sport.

The final score: Des Moines Demons 13, Wichita Aviators 6.

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