Kenneth "Kenny" Hower Buttolph, born in 1938 and died in 2016, crossed Iola's bridges over the South Branch of the Little Wolf River countless times as a lifelong automobile enthusiast and longtime representative for Old Cars. After settling north of Iola at Peru in 1981, he drove to and from Iola and Krause Publications multiple times daily, often in the Old Cars 1954 Chevrolet panel truck known as "Buck," and his work took him across the country for nearly four decades. He regularly exercised his expansive car collection on trips across the Little Wolf River for 35 years, and many of his vehicles appeared in the Iola Old Car Show's Blue Ribbon Concours, whose establishment he drove and for which he invited many of the featured historic automobiles. His contributions from the earliest days of the Iola Old Car Show in the 1970s helped it grow into a renowned attraction. The South Branch crossing itself traces back to 1853, when Silas Miller identified a suitable point on the river for an impoundment and a sawmill on the north shore became the beginning of the Iola community. Ownership passed in 1857 to Henry Wipf and his sons Jacob and Conrad, and the mill and adjoining properties remained under Wipf family control for more than 100 years. As businesses and residences spread southward, a bridge became necessary; the first was probably built of pine structural timbers and planked decking, then later replaced by a light steel structure. After the January 10, 1906 breaching of the impoundment dam washed away that bridge's abutments, two stone-faced, concrete-based culvert-style structures were built, with Morton Lovdahl beginning construction on July 23, 1906 and essential completion announced on October 4, 1906. The present replacement structure was built from July to October 2020 and inaugurated on October 13. The Wipf enterprise also expanded with a flour mill, Iola Mills, in 1861 and later a shingle mill on the south side of the impoundment outlet, and through transactions in 1968, 1983, and 1988 this area was acquired by Sheveland-Taylor Post 14 of the American Legion for Memorial Park development.