Sen. Joni Ernst: Heartland daughter – July 4th a time to remember values I learned growing up in Iowa

I’ve worn many hats in my lifetime – as a farm girl growing up in a rural community, as a mother raising a daughter who has delighted me and made me proud, as a soldier at home and abroad, and now as a United States senator. But one identity has been the continuous line through everything else I’ve done –I am an Iowan, a daughter of the heartland.

Iowa has always been an aspirational place. First settled thousands of years ago by Native Americans, and part of the great surge west in the 1800s, it became the 29th state in 1846. By 1854, it was hosting the Iowa State Fair, which remains a signature event to this day.   American settlers came to Iowa for the fertile lands and the wide-open spaces, believing that anything was possible away from the congested urban coastline. That sense of promise was in the soil and in the sturdy determination and courage of the people who left the relative security of the East for its unexplored terrain.