Underwood, IA

Underwood is a Pottawattamie County city up in Iowa’s Loess Hills, where the land rolls in windblown ridges instead of the usual flat prairie. The Underwood Community School District gives the town a clear center, while Council Bluffs and the Omaha area sit to the southwest beyond the hills. There is not much mystery to the town’s shape: school, highway, farms, and those soft-edged loess ridges doing the scenery. Underwood is western Iowa with a small-town grid pressed against a very particular landscape.