Although many people who live in rural areas and small towns leave for big cities, a man in western Iowa bucked the trend, returning home — house and all — to take over his family’s farm.
LEILA FADEL, HOST:
The saying goes, you can’t go home again. Iowa Public Radio’s Sheila Brummer has a story about the lengths one man went through to do it anyway.
SHEILA BRUMMER, BYLINE: Tim Youngquist always wanted to move back home.
TIM YOUNGQUIST: Farming is a great lifestyle. I had a great upbringing here in western Iowa.
BRUMMER: Youngquist is 41 years old. He left for Iowa State University in Ames at 18 and now works there as an agricultural specialist. But he returns every fall to help with the harvest on the family farm and wants to move back for good. That makes him kind of unusual. Iowa has experienced a steady rural erosion since 1900. From 2010 to 2020, more than two-thirds of Iowa’s counties lost population, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Youngquist and his wife, Mandy, struggled to find a decent place in the countryside, until she says they heard about a house in the small town of Kiron, population 262, close to where Tim grew up.
MANDY YOUNGQUIST: First, I thought he was crazy because we had to buy it on an online auction. We looked at it once for about half an hour before we decided to buy it.
BRUMMER: Tim calls it Victorian folk style. Two stories tall, white, with a wraparound porch and six bedrooms. But the home wasn’t just any home. They quickly discovered it was originally owned by Tim’s great-great-grandfather, Swan Olaf Crook, more than 100 years ago.
T YOUNGQUIST: I don’t know how to describe it. I’d say it’s either, you know, some kind of divine intervention or certainly good luck.
BRUMMER: But the historic house was more than 4 miles from the countryside where Youngquist wanted to live. So in the fall, they hired a company to move the 120,000-pound, 2,000 square foot house, with Tim recording the action.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
T YOUNGQUIST: We got a police escort. My goodness, I’ve never seen anything like it.
BRUMMER: Mandy says it brought a mixture of nerves and excitement.
M YOUNGQUIST: Pretty wild to see just, like, this massive thing coming over the horizon. There’s farm fields all around. It’s misty. And then all of a sudden, this house just rises over the hill through the mist. It’s pretty crazy.
BRUMMER: As Tim and Mandy Youngquist walk over the wood floor and up a staircase, they envision their three small children here.
T YOUNGQUIST: I cannot wait to have a Christmas tree, you know, kind of sitting right here and some nice French doors around the corner.
BRUMMER: Even more stunned to see the big house on the farm? Tim’s dad, Denny Youngquist.
DENNY YOUNGQUIST: I’m glad it’s here and everybody goes home with all ten fingers, (laughter) is No. 1.
BRUMMER: The older Youngquist says having his son move back secures a succession plan. Someday, Tim will take over. Studies show as many as 80% of farms lack a plan to pass down operations. Denny last stepped inside of the old Crook house in the 1960s for Sunday dinner. He was 16. Back then, most people didn’t leave. Youngquist says, these days, without many jobs or opportunities in the area, they move away.
D YOUNGQUIST: Whether it’s the Des Moines area, Omaha, Kansas City, Chicago, Minneapolis. That’s not good, but it’s the way it is.
BRUMMER: The younger Youngquist plans to write the next chapter of his family’s story alongside a gravel road, fields and grain bins.
T YOUNGQUIST: A lot of people, you think, oh, the only way to find a future is to move to a bigger city if you want to accomplish your dreams. You can’t do it here in rural Iowa. And I disagree with that. I think that you can do anything anywhere you want, especially now in 2025.
BRUMMER: Tim Youngquist expects renovations to take at least a year before his whole family can make new memories in the house his great-great-grandfather built.
For NPR News, I’m Sheila Brummer in Kiron, Iowa.
(SOUNDBITE OF UNCLE TUPELO’S “SANDUSKY”)
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