Lots of towns have some claim to fame. Usually it’s proclaimed on a sign or billboard on the way into town.

Onawa, IA, has two claims and uses banners on streetlamp poles to do the boasting.

The Eskimo Pie one caught my eye first. And soon after that I saw the Widest main street boast.

Widest Street

Onawa, Iowa (Photo by Ron Haines)

It turns out, however that width is in the eye of the beholder,  how you measure it, and who you’re rooting for. A small bit of research turns up five other towns in the U.S. making the same claim: Greenwood, SC; Keene, NH; Plains, KS; Newburgh, NY, and New Orleans (Canal Street).

Onawa’s main street—it’s actually called Iowa Avenue—was platted wide because at the time it was thought a railroad would be built through town. That never happened.

In the 1980s, in the midst of a bit of claiming and counter claiming on the part of some of the towns boasting of wide main streets, students from the Onawa School District tackled the measuring project

“One of the girls and her dad went down late at night and measured the street from storefront to storefront,” said Jo Petersen, a former school district coordinator, and came up with 157 feet.

Eskimo Pie

The Eskimo Pie claim is a bit more clear cut. In case you’ve forgotten your childhood, it’s a bar of ice cream covered in chocolate and wrapped in tin foil.

Now part of the Nestle stable of products, it was created in Onawa in 1920 by Christian

Christian Kent Nelson

Kent Nelson, a Danish immigrant who taught school and owned a candy store in town.

He says he was inspired to create it when a boy in his store was unable to decide whether to spend his money on ice cream or a chocolate bar.

Nelson, then 25, experimented and came up with a dipping machine so he could adhere melted chocolate to a bar of ice cream. He started marketing them as “I-Scream Bars.”

In 1921 he filed for a patent and partnered with a chocolate producer for mass production.  By 1922, through franchising and licensing the formula to other manufacturers, they were selling a million pies a day, obviously a lot of them to out-of-towners. (In the 1920s, Onawa had a population of about 2,500, only some 300 fewer than it has today.)

So, who’s the chocolate producer Nelson teamed up with? It was a fellow by the name of

Russell C. Stover

Russell C. Stover, an Omaha chemist, entrepreneur and candy company employee. It was he who devised the formula for the chocolate shell that hardens on exposure to cold and holds the ice cream contents within. Stover’s wife, Clara, is credited with coming up with the name Eskimo Pie.

And yes, after selling their share of the business to Nelson in 1924, Russell and Clara went on to form Russell Stover Candies.