Iowa Life Highlights Our History

We are a band music publishing company.

We have been in business for 138 years.

We are at our warehouse, which houses at the moment over 7000 different products that we published over the years.

Anywhere from the very first semester beginning bands in the fifth or sixth grade, all the way up through college, university, adult and professional bands.

And we shipped music to Japan, many European countries, Australia, China, South America.

just all over the world.

Barnhouse was started by a man named C.L.

Barnhouse, Charles Lloyd Barnhouse.

He was apparently a very good cornetist.

The problem was, he was sometimes in bands where he wasn't getting paid regularly.

And so he happened to be in Des Moines playing with a musical comedy show, and he hadn't gotten paid for 2 or 3 weeks, and they got ticked off and said, I quit at the same time.

He had been composing music, but not having a whole lot of luck getting things published.

So he thought, I'm going to try to start my own publishing company.

So this is the very first publication from the CL Barnhouse Company, a march called The Battle of Shiloh that was written by Carl Barnhouse.

This was number one in our catalog, the very first piece of music that the company ever published.

You have to think back into the terms of 1886, when this company started.

Music had to be engraved into a sheet of metal, of zinc or lead, using tools that were shaped for different kinds of musical symbols.

If you wanted to make an eighth note, for example, you would use one tool for the note head.

You'd use another tool for the note stem.

You use another tool for the flag on the eighth note.

So just to make one note, you'd have to use three different tools and punch them into the sheet of lead in reverse.

Because all of the printing was done as a reverse impression.

So it was a very painstaking process to produce the engraving plates for music publications back in those days.

Good evening everyone, and welcome to downtown Oskaloosa.

And an evening of music with the one and only Oskaloosa City Band.

My name is .........

In the days before radio and television and even sound recordings, people, if they wanted to hear music, they had one of two choices.

They could go someplace where it was being performed, or they could make it themselves.

Much of the music we perform each week is published locally at CL Barnhouse House, located on the north edge of town.

And so often in smaller communities, especially, there would be a town band that would play concerts, perhaps during the summertime, or perform for community events, or be in parades.

And that was the only opportunity that a lot of average people had to hear music.

Written by C.L.

Barnhouse, composer Robert Sheldon.

This is Hill Country Holiday.

But it was all about entertainment.

I mean, people went to band concerts because they wanted to have a good time.

They wanted to enjoy the music.

They wanted to hear music that was tuneful, that was melodic, that was rhythmic.

It was all about entertainment.

And if people didn't enjoy what they heard, they wouldn't come back.

So the bands played what audiences wanted to hear.

So when the company started, he started off publishing just his own music, and then later other composers came to him and we began publishing the music of others.

We've always been associated with circus music, and circus performances of 100 years ago were accompanied by live music, and many of the musicians who led the circus bands and who wrote music published with us.

The most famous of those composers, Carl King, was a circus musician for nine years.

His career there culminated with the leadership of the Barnum and Bailey Circus Band, and he composed over 200 pieces of music that we published.

This is a picture of the 1913 Barnum and Bailey Circus Band.

And this fellow right back here is Carl King playing the baritone.

And this is the band that Carl King wrote, Barnum and Bailey, his favorite for earlier that year.

That's the most famous march that we ever published.

It's probably the most famous circus march ever written, and when you hear it, you immediately think of a circus.

I have a very strange history with this company.

Band sort of became my thing in high school.

I wasn't involved in sports, I wasn't involved in other activities.

Band was kind of my home.

And so as I became interested in the music, I started looking for recordings of band music.

And then I decided I was going to start collecting this kind of music.

So I started purchasing band music from different places.

And one of those was Barnhouse, and I got really excited about the circus music aspect of it, and Carl King and I finally wrote to the people of Barnhouse, and I asked, is there any kind of a list of his music?

And the response was, well, we have this, this archive of music, but it's kind of disorganized and I don't know what compelled me to do this, but I said, what if I came up there and went through your archive and got it organized for you?

And Bob Barnhouse senior, who was a grandson of the founder, I said, okay, that'd be fun.

Bob Senior gave me a key to the building.

I was here for a week and he said, just come and go as you please lock up when you leave.

So here's a 17 year old kid going through the music art that and then over the years, I started my teaching career and I started doing some other things and music and stayed in touch with the folks here.

And in the late 90s, they asked me to start writing arrangements for them to publish.

And so a couple of years later, I was in the middle of a job transition in Saint Louis, and he said, did you ever think about moving to Iowa?

And so I said, I'd love to talk about that.

So I was 15 when I first came to the Barnhouse Company, and I'm 62 now, so it's been a lifetime thing.

I feel honored to be a part of this, getting to actually have a job that I love so much.

I'm just a lucky guy.

♪♪ [Sean Ulmer] Right now we're sitting in the Grant Wood Studio.

It is where he created many of his most famous works, including American Gothic.

Grant Wood was well aware of art movements throughout time.

He was well aware of renaissance and classical antiquity.

He just chose to live and work in Iowa where he found plenty of material to paint.

♪♪ [Sean Ulmer] A lot of the success of Grant Wood was due in part to the people of Cedar Rapids.

They supported him.

Being able to move into this studio, Grant Wood was able to live here rent free and that was really a gift from the Turner's who owned the mortuary next door who had employed him to help convert the mansion into a funeral home.

It was originally supposed to be a studio, a place where he would work, but he realized very quickly that with a little bit of creativity this could be a place where he not only worked but also lived, not only for him but also for his mother Hattie and for his sister Nan.

And, as a result, it allowed him to give up his job teaching and work full-time as an artist.

♪♪ [Sean Ulmer] He really refabricated sort of the whole interior here.

Look around at the studio and realize it was just an empty shell.

It was just an empty hay loft.

♪♪ [Sean Ulmer] One of the first things that Grant Wood had to do was heat the place.

So, he installed this fireplace in the middle of the studio, of the hay loft.

And he built it all himself out of the brick and then for the hood he used an upside down bushel basket, metal bushel basket.

And it was centrally located in the middle of the studio so it would warm the entire place.

It was adjacent to what they call the hot dog stand.

And it has been heavily modified by subsequent tenants.

But this was an area where these doors would open and then a table would pull out and, on that table, they would set the linens and they would sit on this side and eat and there is a pass through to the kitchen.

[Sean Ulmer] So, over here we see more of his built-ins.

He's got these built-in cabinets that would hold the blankets and the linens and some other clothing as well, although they had dressers.

But more importantly, underneath this built-in is where, on either side of the rood, is where they stored their beds.

So, at night they would pull the beds out, they would sleep in the beds and in the morning, they would push them in and they had little curtains that they would draw to close it off so you wouldn't actually see it.

[Sean Ulmer] So, this bedroom area, which was multiuse, was also an area where Grant Wood would stage little plays.

There were curtains that hung right here.

And they would have little plays.

The audience would sit out there.

This would be the stage.

And this really was the birth of the first community theatre in Cedar Rapids, which is still going strong today.

[Sean Ulmer] This space really does reveal a whole different side of Grant Wood than most people know.

It's charming.

It feels kind of cozy.

And yet it was a place of great creativity for Grant Wood.

He produces some of his most famous works of art.

♪♪

♪♪ [Jared McDonald] You don't think of Iowa being an apple state.

But, the story of the Red Delicious apple starts down in Peru and starts with Jesse Hiatt.

[Nebbe] Jesse Hiatt was a quaker farmer who was working in his orchard when he noticed a strange looking seeding growing out of the root of a dead bell flower apple tree.

[Jared McDonald] So, he actually chopped that sprout down once, cleaned up that area, and then the following spring another sprout came up from that same area of that bell flower tree.

So, he decided to leave it be and see what would come of it.

[Nebbe] The sprout became a tree and Hiatt found its apples were unlike anything he had ever seen.

[Jared McDonald] The description of the new apple was a bleached reddish strawberry colored skin and it had five lobes on the bottom, which had never been in an apple before.

So, he tried it, he thought it was the best apple he had ever tried and he actually named it the Hawkeye apple after the Hawkeye state of Iowa.

[Nebbe] Several years later, when a wealthy nursery man named Clarence Stark began a search for a new apple cultivar, Hiatt entered his Hawkeye apples into the contest.

[Jared McDonald] Mr. Stark walked around and actually carried a little booklet in his breast pocket of names for future fruits and vegetables when he came across them and he had had one for many, many years waiting to be used, which was delicious.

[Nebbe] Upon biting into Hiatt's apple, Stark allegedly exclaimed, delicious!

[Jared McDonald] And he was so excited to figure out where these apples came from.

And in the process of shipping and unpacking at the show, Jesse Hiatt's information got lost.

♪♪ [Nebbe] Thankfully, Stark persisted in his search for the perfect apple and he hosted another competition the following year.

And Hiatt, unaware that he had won the previous year, entered again.

This time, the entry form was not lost and Hiatt was rightfully proclaimed the winner.

[Jared McDonald] Mr. Stark was able to get in contact with Jesse Hiatt and the Stark Nursery came and purchased the grafting rights, the plant rights and the seed rights to the then Hawkeye apple, now delicious apple.

The name would later be changed to Red Delicious as more and more apple varieties were discovered.

And though the Red Delicious no longer enjoys the market dominance of its heyday, its story remains a lesson in perseverance and holds a special place in our state's agricultural legacy.

♪♪ [Jared McDonald] There is an apple tree still there to this day.

There is a marker in the field as well.

In our community, it is something we are very proud of.

♪♪

♪♪ [Nebbe] Iowa's natural landscape holds many wonders, rolling hills, deep river valleys and outstanding geological features.

Nestled within that natural beauty are iconic structures that are themselves a work of art, like the boathouse at Backbone State Park, the stone bridge at Ledges and the spillway at Beed's Lake.

These projects and dozens more were built by the Civilian Conservation Corp in the 1930s.

♪♪ [Nebbe] The CCC was a government program founded in the midst of the Great Depression by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

In 1933, nearly one in four Americans was out of a job and there was an urgent need to employ young men.

The men who joined the Corp were young, some would say still boys.

They were the boys of the CCC.

♪♪ [Don Foley] We did help a lot of people that really were down and out and it got them going a little bit because there wasn't any money, nobody had any money.

♪♪ [Owen Beaman] Times were rough.

My dad had died and I and my brother were still at home and you couldn't find a job or anything.

And we had lost the farm where my dad had spent his lifetime saving up to buy the farm and he owed quite a bit on it and you need eating money, my mother needed eating money.

♪♪ ♪ Why did I join the CCC?

♪ ♪ Why did I join the CCC?

[Nebbe] Only single men between the ages of 18 and 25 whose families were on relief were eligible to join the Civilian Conservation Corp.

In exchange for hard labor, a CCC boy received room and board, clothing, training and a monthly paycheck of $30, $25 of which was sent straight home to his family.

♪♪ [Nebbe] Just the idea of three meals and a bed were enough to get many young men to enroll in the CCC.

♪♪ [Otto Schwartz] It was run very much like in the Army.

We slept in Army cots, we made the bed like the Army, we had things, cleaned things like the Army, we polished our shoes like they did in the Army, very much so.

It was good training, I'll tell you what.

I grew up in a hurry.

[Nebbe] The camps operated under military style rules, but it wasn't all work.

There were sports teams and educational opportunities.

♪♪ [Nebbe] The Civilian Conservation Corp was designed to help not only the nation's human resources, but its natural resources as well.

♪♪ [Nebbe] Much of what we enjoy today in Iowa's state parks, we owe to the hard labor of more than 46,000 young men.

[Owen Beaman] I look at it now and it was probably the best thing that ever happened to us, us young people then that didn't have a job.

And I think it was a good deal.

I think Franklin Roosevelt knew what he was doing.

♪♪