Mount Vernon — Iowa | Shared Latitude

A hilltop college town along the old Lincoln Highway where Cornell College runs its entire academic year one class at a time. Lia and I wandered the campus quad on a quiet break week and had the whole hill to ourselves.

Mount Vernon is a small town built quite literally around a hill, and at the top of it sits Cornell College, a liberal arts school with a curriculum unlike almost anywhere else in the country: students take one class at a time, in intensive three-and-a-half-week blocks, rather than juggling four or five subjects across a semester. We arrived during a break week, campus nearly empty, and the quiet gave us free rein to wander King Chapel’s white spire and the brick academic halls without dodging a single backpack.

The One Course At A Time campus

Cornell’s hilltop quad, laid out with mature oaks and a scattering of nineteenth-century buildings, has a compactness that makes the “block plan,” as locals call it, feel almost architecturally inevitable — everything a student needs for one intensive class sits within a five-minute walk. We climbed the steps of King Chapel, its bell tower visible for miles across the surrounding farmland, and a groundskeeper mowing nearby paused to tell us, with evident affection, that the block system means every few weeks an entirely different set of students effectively “moves in” to focus on one subject with total intensity, then moves on to the next. It’s a strange, admirable rhythm for a town this size to organize its whole identity around.

The white steeple of King Chapel rising above Cornell College's hilltop quad in Mount Vernon, Iowa

First Avenue and the old Lincoln Highway

Down off the hill, Mount Vernon’s small commercial strip runs along what was once part of the original Lincoln Highway, America’s first coast-to-coast auto route, and a handful of brick storefronts from that early-twentieth-century boom still stand along First Avenue. We had coffee at a shop clearly built for long study sessions, laptops open at half the tables even during break week, and Lia pointed out a faded ghost sign on a brick wall advertising a long-gone hotel that once catered to Lincoln Highway travelers passing through on their way across the state.

A faded historic ghost sign painted on a brick storefront along First Avenue in Mount Vernon, Iowa

Getting There

Mount Vernon is about twenty minutes east of Cedar Rapids, whose airport (The Eastern Iowa Airport, CID) offers the closest commercial service, or roughly thirty-five minutes northeast of Iowa City. A car is necessary, since Mount Vernon has no public transit and the hilltop campus, while walkable once you’ve parked, sits a short drive from the surrounding towns worth combining it with.