Along a couple of blocks, there are two law offices, a real-estate office, an insurance brokerage, a coffee shop, a sewing shop, a store that sells Bibles, books, and gifts, a notions-and-antiques store, a hair-and-tanning salon, and a home-décor-and-clothing boutique, as well as the Sioux County farm bureau, the town hall, and the red brick Romanesque courthouse. Its Central Avenue is not the hollowed-out, boarded-up Main Street of twenty-first-century lore. Orange City is small and cut off, but, unlike many such towns, it is not dying. But Orange City never had a river or a railroad, or, until recently, even a four-lane highway, and so its pure, hermetic culture has been preserved. Hawarden, another town, twenty miles away, is on the Big Sioux River, and was founded as a stop on the Northwestern Railroad in the eighteen-seventies it had a constant stream of strangers coming through, with hotels to service them and drinking and gambling going on. Sioux County is in the northwest corner of the state, and Orange City is isolated from the world outside-an hour over slow roads to the interstate, more than two hours to the airport in Omaha, nearly four to Des Moines. Orange City, the county seat of Sioux County, Iowa, is a square mile and a half of town, more or less, population six thousand, surrounded by fields in every direction. To hear more feature stories, download the Audm app for your iPhone.
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