Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Stone Arch Viaduct
Built in 1883. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1998.
From the record
“The Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Stone Arch Viaduct, also known as the Old Stone Arch, is located northeast of Shelby, Iowa, United States. The span carried the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad tracks over Little Silver Creek.”
Wikipedia article Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Stone Arch Viaduct, CC BY-SA 4.0.
One of 13 National Register listings published here for Shelby County · listed in 1998 · category: Structure · built in 1883.
National Register reference number.98000870- 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
2 since 2001
Regional context, not property-specific
evidence. The
federal wildfire occurrence database
lists 2 fires within 5 miles of Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad Stone Arch Viaduct
between 2001 and 2014, burning about 10 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
Recreation and ceremony
1
Missing data/not specified/undetermined
1
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 National Weather Service names
Shelby, the town this property stands in, in 25 storm reports between 1994 and 2024: 12 thunderstorm wind, 8 hail, 3 tornado, 2 funnel cloud.
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.
This tornado entered Shelby County from Pottawattamie County from the southwest. The tornado impacted a total of 6 farmsteads in the county as it tracked to the north northeast. Damage at these farmsteads was confined to mainly outbuilding being damaged or destroyed, trees uprooted, and electrical power poles downed. The tornado tracked across the western side of the Harlan Airport without doing damage to the airport, but a wind gust associated with the rear-flank downdraft of the storm was measured at 76 mph at the automatic observing equipment on the east side of the airport. The tornado finally ended just to the southeast of the city of Harlan.
This is a continuation of the EF-1 tornado that started in Pottawattamie County. This tornado crosses into far southwest Shelby County just east of the intersection of Elmwood Road and 100th Street. Several tree trunks were snapped along Elmwood Road as the tornado continued to the northeast. This tornado dissipated about a quarter of a mile into Shelby County. Peak wind speeds for this final segment of the tornado track were estimated at 88 mph. Peak tornado width was measured at 100 yards, with an average width in this segment of the track estimated at 50 yards.
This is a continuation of the Minden, Iowa EF-3 tornado. Prior to this segment, the tornado had tracked through Pottawattamie County and a small portion of extreme southeast Harrison County. After crossing into Shelby County between York Road and 335th Street, tree and powerline damage continued to the northeast, with a home having its roof blown off near County Road M16 and 450th Street. Trees in the area were uprooted or snapped at the base of the trunk. A home was badly damaged, and a barn was destroyed less than one mile southeast of Tennant. The tornado appears to have been widest near 750th Street and Hackberry Road, at approximately 1900 yards in width based on tree and powerline damage. At Highway 44, a home was destroyed along with substantial tree damage. Most walls of the home were standing, but a large automobile was thrown or rolled nearly a quarter mile. The tree and vehicle damage suggested that this location was a stronger section of the tornado, and was subsequently rated EF-3. The tornado tracked approximately 1.5 miles northwest of Harlan and began to turn more towards the north, significantly damaging at least 3 homes near Highway 59 as it crossed. It turned almost due north and traveled several miles along Linden Road, and missed the town of Defiance, Iowa by less than half a mile to the east. A second tornado developed just to the east of this one at this time, tracking along Oak Road and causing separate damage. Near Defiance the tornado also became rain-wrapped according to chaser video, and appears likely to have ended just south of the Crawford-Shelby county line. There is some potential based on radar data that this tornado tracked farther north into Crawford County, but damage surveys did not identify a track continuation. The peak estimated winds in this segment of the tornado track were 140 miles per hour. The maximum width of the tornado was measured at 1900 yards with an average width estimated at 1300 yards.
An uncalibrated anemometer off of a home weather station measured a thunderstorm wind gust of 105 mph. The wind speed was estimated here to be in the range of other wind gusts recorded with this event across east central Nebraska and Western Iowa from more potentially accurate sources.
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.
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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