Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1986.
From the record
“The Polygonal Barn, New Oregon Township is an historic building located near Cresco in rural Howard County, Iowa, United States. It was built in 1920 as a show barn for English Shorthorn cattle.”
Wikipedia article Polygonal Barn, New Oregon Township, CC BY-SA 4.0.
One of 8 National Register listings published here for Howard County · listed in 1986 · category: Building.
Also known as. Iowa Round Barns: The Sixty Year Experiment TR
Township. New Oregon township
National Register reference number.86001437- the number the National Park Service assigned this property when it was listed, and the key its nomination file is catalogued under at the National Archives.
Fires near this property
9 since 2006
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 9 fires within 5 miles of Polygonal Barn, New Oregon Township
between 2006 and 2020, burning about 20 acres in total. None started naturally. None was recorded as arson.
Distance is straight-line from the map coordinates, so a fire counted
here may appear on a neighbouring settlement's page as well.
Reported cause
Fires
Missing data/not specified/undetermined
5
Debris and open burning
4
The most recent of
them, most recent first, with the day each was reported and the service
that recorded it.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The federal mineral resources record lists
4 workings within 5 miles of Polygonal Barn, New Oregon Township: 2 past producers, 1 unknown, 1 producer.
1 still produces. What was taken out: Sand and Gravel, Construction, Stone, Crushed/Broken. Distance is straight-line from the
map coordinates, so a quarry counted here may appear on a neighbouring
settlement's page as well.
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The National Weather Service names
Cresco, the town this property stands in, in 43 storm reports between 1994 and 2020: 15 thunderstorm wind, 14 hail, 3 funnel cloud, 3 flood.
No death or injury is recorded in these reports. Each account below is quoted exactly as the forecast office
filed it, from the NOAA Storm Events Database, and each date
opens the federal record of that event.
A fire at an assisted living facility in Cresco was started by a lightning strike. A portion of the building sustained heavy damage but all the residents were safely evacuated.
A oak tree in Cresco, estimated to be at least 150 years old, had to be cut down after a lightning strike seriously damaged the tree. The lightning strike also took out the controller card to some nearby stoplights.
Two frontal systems were moving southeast across the central United States. The first cold front was Pacific in origin and was quite weak. A much stronger cold front dropped southeast from Canada and entered Iowa during the afternoon. The air mass was capped in the mid levels. CAPE values were in the 2000-3000 J-kg-1 range ahead of the Canadian cold front. Surface dew point temperatures in the lower 70s F. Strong thunderstorms developed over north central Iowa and moved into the northeast counties. The produced brief heavy rainfall and gusty winds for the most part. A few storms produced hail during the early evening hours as colder air moved in aloft. Three-quarter-inch diameter hail fell in several locations over northeast Iowa. Golf ball-size hail fell in a few locations. Both Applington, in Butler County, and New Haven, in Mitchell County, reported golf ball-size hail.
Scattered thunderstorms moved across northern Iowa during the evening hours. There were numerous reports of pea- to marble-size hail with them, covering the ground in some locations. The gradient winds were quite strong during the evening. Minor damage occurred in Cresco as one storm produced winds of 58 mph.
Numerous streets were flooded in Cresco and the water was deep enough in the downtown area to go over the curbs and threatened to go into some businesses. The flooding was produced by 2.65 inches of rain that fell in an hour and a half.
No historic map-sheet match is published
for this property yet. That does not mean no map exists. This record needs
a coordinate-quality review before it can be joined to a sheet boundary.
Browse the county's mapped places while that work is
pending.
Listed places nearby
1 within 8 miles
Other National Register properties close
enough to walk or drive between, ordered by distance from this one. Both
positions come from the same geocoding pass that matched these properties
to their map sheets.
Listing record. National Park Service National Register of Historic Places, listed-properties dataset, current to 2026-05-22.
Map join. Address geocoded through the United States Census geocoder, then tested against the published boundary of every sheet in the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection.
How this page is made. Listing fields come from federal records; map-sheet coverage is a labelled coordinate-to-boundary calculation, not a source-field claim.
Wildfire. Short, Karen C. 2022. Spatial wildfire occurrence data for the United States, 1992-2020 [FPA_FOD_20221014]. 6th Edition. Fort Collins, CO: Forest Service Research Data Archive. https://doi.org/10.2737/RDS-2013-0009.6 Collected with United States Government funding and usable without additional permissions or fees.
Mines and quarries. USGS Mineral Resources Data System (MRDS) https://mrdata.usgs.gov/mrds/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105.
Storms. NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, Storm Events Database https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/stormevents/ A work of the United States government, no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. Narratives are quoted verbatim from the National Weather Service report and are not edited or summarised.
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