Up Highway 13 🌿
Backbone Country
Strawberry Point is Backbone country, and Backbone is why most people up here end up needing a hundred chairs.
Backbone State Park sits about three miles south of town. It was Iowa's first state park, dedicated in 1920, and most of what is still standing was built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s — the stone lodge, the shelters, the trails running along the Devil's Backbone ridge itself. The park rents a day-use lodge, a beach lodge, an outdoor auditorium, five picnic shelters and sixteen cabins through the state reservation system, and people book those for reunions and weddings a year ahead.
What a park reservation does not come with is seating for your guest list. That is our half of the job. We have set up a wedding near Backbone, and the pattern is always the same: the location is gorgeous, the date is locked in, and somebody still has to solve chairs and tables for a hundred people who are driving in from three states.
We are about seventeen miles away, twenty-five minutes up Highway 13 past Edgewood. One trailer carries all of it — 100 folding chairs, 20 six-foot tables, chair dollies included so you can roll a stack across grass instead of carrying it. $250 for customer pickup, $350 delivered and picked back up.
Strawberry Days runs the second weekend in June: parade, carnival, 5K, tractor and truck pull, free strawberries and ice cream in the middle of town. We have not worked that weekend yet. If you are hosting family around it, we would like the call.
And yes, the strawberry is still standing out front of City Hall on Commercial Street. Fifteen feet of fiberglass, freshly restored in 2025. It is the easiest landmark in Clayton County to give out-of-town guests as a meeting point.
Church and camp groups gather up here as well. Ewalu sits just outside town with lodges, cabins and a retreat center of its own. If your group is bringing more people than the space you booked is set up to seat, that is a one-trailer problem.
