Along the main drag in Rock Springs, Wisconsin, is a sidewalk to nowhere.
A little more than a decade ago, there were eight buildings on this stretch, which parallels the Narrows Creek just before it tumbles into the Baraboo River. Today, only an old bank building remains. From there, the sidewalk lines an open grassy patch so incongruous you can almost see the village that once was: the historic facade of the Coach House pub, the cheery planters overflowing with petunias, the green banners on each lamppost welcoming visitors to the place, as the town motto goes, “where the waters meet.”
“Storms are getting worse and becoming more frequent. These communities recognize they gotta do something, or their town is going to be, step by step, flood by flood, going away.”
In 2008, those waters overflowed on a historic scale, swelling more than twenty-eight feet and cascading into the town’s treasured community center, drowning the library and village office in the basement. More than ninety of the village’s then-400 residents were displaced from their homes. Locals went to work mucking out and building back what they could.
“We felt pretty good about ourselves,” Village Trustee Jamie Busser tells me. “Ten years later, we got another 100-year flood.”
After that second major disaster, in 2018, the residents of Rock Springs decided to take a different approach: move the heart of their 170-year-old village to a new location, outside the floodplain.
“Enough’s enough,” says Village President Lisa Zautke, recalling the sentiment at the time. “We’re not doing this anymore.”
This “community relocation” solution to flooding is in the local blood. The nearby village of Soldiers Grove made national headlines when it pioneered the model more than forty years ago, moving its Main Street businesses up onto a ridge. About a decade ago, downstream neighbor Gays Mills followed suit, laying out an expansive new neighborhood on a hillside. Now, Rock Springs is among at least four more Driftless towns moving to higher ground—an entire region leading the nation in a grand climate adaptation experiment.
I visited Rock Springs last fall at the outset of a road trip through what I’ve taken to calling “uprooted America”—U.S. communities where climate-driven crises have forced locals to reckon with leaving home. I thought about starting my trip in California, where the state’s largest single wildfire on record had just wiped out an entire town. Or in Louisiana, whose famously hurricane-prone coast is losing more land per minute than just about anywhere else on Earth.
Instead, I decided to begin in this unlikely cradle of America’s Great Climate Migration, a place in my own home state that Wisconsinites call “the Driftless.” The region got that name because the two-mile-thick glacier that covered much of North America during the last Ice Age never drifted over it. It meant the untrammeled land retained its dramatic ridges and limestone outcroppings, looking more like the foothills of Appalachia than the gently rolling fields of Wisconsin.
It is an alluring landscape that lends itself to a vigorous economy of canoeing and hiking and biking—and to flooding. This became a problem when settlers built towns along rivers in the narrow valleys between ridges, where the water has nowhere to go but up, and often, inside.
You can tell the moment you cross into the Driftless Region, as I did in November 2021, when the land rises sharply under your wheels, and yellow signs for Amish horse-drawn carriage traffic punctuate the winding roads. “Wow,” I exhaled as I rounded a deep bend into Rock Springs, the treeline sloping softly down the ridge before me into a postcard view of the hills.
Alexandra Tempus
The old Baraboo Bank building is all that remains of Rock Springs’ main drag. Eight buildings have come down here in the last decade-plus due to flood damage.
My first stop was the village’s squeaky-new municipal building, a combination fire station/public works department, village office, library, and community center that sits up the road, higher in elevation than the old downtown. It is a cornerstone of Rock Springs’ relocation plan, which, together with plans for an apartment complex and a subdivision of duplex homes, will cost $6 million, a combination of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and U.S. Department of Agriculture money, plus local matching funds.
When I arrived, it had been exactly one year since Rock Springs broke ground on the municipal building and just a few weeks after its open house for residents. Out front, backlit signs for the library and municipal wings glowed against the gray craftsman-style exterior, and a mural of outdoorsy Driftless scenes adorned the firehouse. While I lingered inside, more than one person asked the librarian on duty if they were in the right place.
Busser and Zautke, who helped lead the community through years of intense meetings about relocation, gave me a tour. We began in the library, which is small but well stocked and full of light. We moved through a roomy kitchen that local families can rent out for their Christmas baking or reunions, and out the other side of it into a cavernous event space where a group was busily preparing for a gathering.
“This is about the same size as the lower part of the community center we have down there,” Busser said. “Or had down there, I should say.”
After the 2018 flood, Rock Springs was the first of the Driftless villages to apply for FEMA “buyout” funds to purchase old damaged buildings and help pay for new construction elsewhere. Before long, the denizens of Rock Springs were advising people in the village of La Valle, a twenty-minute drive north, on their own potential relocation plans. One special challenge: La Valle doesn’t have space for residential development outside its floodplain.
“I said, ‘You gotta think out of the box,’ ” Busser recalls, encouraging La Valle officials to start a conversation about acquiring land from a local farmer. “If you name a road after somebody, it goes a long way. Farming’s not what it used to be.”
As Wisconsin emerged from the 2018 floods—a weeks-long ordeal that involved road closures, school cancellations, and a presidential disaster declaration—Kurt Muchow also found himself nudging Driftless villagers to think outside the box.
Few people were in a better position to do so. As a young man, Muchow had been among the team of planners and engineers who designed the relocated business district for Soldiers Grove in 1978. It was among the very first community relocation projects in the country, and it became a model for municipalities desperate to hold themselves together while moving people and infrastructure out of harm’s way.
Alexandra Tempus
Jamie Busser, village trustee, takes in the flood-battered remains of the treasured community center in Rock Springs. The building is slated to be demolished, but residents hope to repurpose the arches in some way.
One of those communities was Gays Mills, just downriver from Soldiers Grove, which after back-to-back floods in 2007 and 2008 enlisted Muchow’s firm, Vierbicher, to help plan a new commercial and residential development site uphill. Today, thirty locals of the town’s roughly 500 residents live there in a neighborhood of single-family homes and townhouses, with their own gas station, a natural foods co-op, a mercantile building occupied by thirteen small businesses, and outdoor green space where there are hopes for a farmer’s market.
Muchow traveled the washed-out roads to the villages of Rock Springs, Viola, Ontario, and La Farge to educate residents about “the Gays Mills experience.” At first, Gays Mills Village President Harry Heisz thought Soldiers Grove was crazy for moving when it did. “Why in the hell are you guys doing this?” he recalls wondering.
But three decades as a volunteer firefighter—bobbing his head through the rafters of a flooded basement, holding on to streetlamps to avoid being swept away in the current—changed his mind. “I’ve been in that floodwater rescuing people. And it’s time we do some moving.”
Now, Muchow notes, these other villages “all look at Gays Mills as, ‘We need to do that.’ ”
Key to planning a community relocation project, Muchow explains, is knowing where to look for grant funding across multiple federal agencies. Programs within FEMA and the Department of Housing and Urban Development commonly provide relocation money, but many other agencies make up pieces of the pie, including the Small Business Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the Economic Development Administration. Communities reeling from a crisis, especially those with limited resources, can often get tangled in red tape: years-long wait times, rigid requirements, and competition for grants.
Muchow and his firm, having gone through the process with Soldiers Grove and Gays Mills, are helping plan new neighborhoods and engineer the infrastructure, as well as secure funding.
Despite these hurdles, and the social upheaval involved in reimagining a town, the villages Muchow visited got onboard for relocation with little fuss. Viola and Ontario began construction on their new sites in late 2021. It was a contrast to Gays Mills, he said, which after the 2007 and 2008 floods went through rounds of consultations and meetings that for a time divided the community.
“Storms are getting worse and becoming more frequent,” Muchow says. “These communities recognize they gotta do something, or their town is going to be, step by step, flood by flood, going away.”
After the Great Flood of 1993 soaked towns up and down the Mississippi and Missouri River watersheds for months on end, veterans of the Soldiers Grove project consulted with decision-makers in Washington, D.C., and a handful of towns in Illinois and Missouri that ended up making moves themselves. With a crescendo of climate-related weather disasters affecting one in ten U.S. homes in 2021, more communities than ever before are seeing the virtues in this approach.
The town of Fair Bluff, North Carolina, walloped by back-to-back hurricanes in 2016 and 2018, built new apartments on land a mile outside of town, and has plans to remove its old flooded-out Main Street businesses and install a new “uptown” retail district a few blocks away. The village of Akiak, Alaska, has successfully located new building sites after it lost a mile of its riverbank to rapid land erosion. Communities in Oklahoma and Texas, with the help of the organizations Climigration Network and Anthropocene Alliance, are carefully strategizing how to begin a conversation about relocation with residents.
Throughout it all, the Driftless relocations, if imperfect, have provided a blueprint for others to build on. A few years back, Heisz says, FEMA arranged a conference call between local officials in Gays Mills and their counterparts in South Carolina eager to learn from their experience. The town of Valmeyer, Illinois, a survivor of the 1993 Great Flood, has been held up in The New York Times and by the U.S. Government Accountability Office as a poster child for relocation in the age of climate change—after having worked closely on its plan with Bill Becker, a leader in the Soldiers Grove relocation effort.
Becker was a young transplant to Soldiers Grove who bought the local paper and soon found himself spearheading a community effort to move the town to higher ground. He went on to work with the U.S. Department of Energy, where he consulted with Valmeyer and other Great Flood towns on how to recruit local school kids to brainstorm about their new town, how to build in energy efficiency, and how to preserve local history through new street and building names.
Not long after Becker moved back to Wisconsin after thirty years away, we met for lunch in Soldiers Grove.
“The first priority ought to be to move the people out of the way,” he tells me between bites of his burger. We could build expensive dams, levees, and seawalls to protect vulnerable communities, built to standards that may well fail the next time a storm breaks a record. Or, he said, we could follow the wisdom in “giving the floodplain back to the river.”
We ate at the Wonder Bar, which existed previously down on the old Soldiers Grove Main Street and has remained a stalwart fixture throughout the move and changes in ownership in the four decades since. It seems like a testimony to what relocation can offer a town in the path of climate disaster: survival.
In Rock Springs, Busser and Zautke take me down the street to the old community center. Since 1948, it has been the soul of the village. Black-and-white photos of its construction hang in the new municipal building, depicting grandfathers of the people who live there now laying bricks and sawing beams of donated local timber.
Though most residents quickly came around to the idea of relocation, saving the community center was a sticking point. To keep it on the spot would have taken a little more than $2 million, and grants that fit the bill were elusive.
“I’ve gotten sworn at, yelled at, you name it, called whatever in the book,” says Zautke, who, like many of her family members, was married in the building. “I’d love to save it just as much as the next person. It’s pulling on everyone’s heartstrings.”
Outside the entrance to the building is a plaque indicating where, on June 10 and 11, 2008, water from the Baraboo River reached its peak at 10.23 feet above the flood stage. That water snaked its way up four concrete stairs, through the doors and up three more stairs inside.
After pointing out the high-water mark in the entryway, Busser leads us into the massive space upstairs. It is long enough and tall enough to serve as a basketball court, as it did for many years. But the real showstopper is its rib cage of six wooden arches, spaced about sixteen feet apart, holding up a stunning beamed maple and oak ceiling. Built-in benches topped by eight-foot-tall paned glass windows line each section between arches. At the far wall is a stage whose curtains were long ago donated to a neighboring town.
The hope, say Busser and Zautke, is to preserve the arches and the roof to top a new pavilion in the now-green space across the street. This often happens in towns that relocate. FEMA regulations require that the demolished areas remain free of permanent indoor structures. What’s left behind are all manner of public outdoor spaces: playgrounds, baseball diamonds, campsites, and, if Rock Springs gets its wish, a gathering place of astonishing quality.
Though they’ve seen it hundreds of times, Busser and Zautke gaze ceiling-ward right along with me, remembering the basketball games, school plays, anniversary parties, concerts, and roller skating nights that once filled the room with life.
“If and when we can move it, that’ll be fun to watch,” Busser says. “The other part of it, knocking the rest of it down . . . ,” he trails off. “I won’t be in town to see that.”
There are still twenty residential lots available in the new hillside neighborhood in Gays Mills—the village just sold three slated for building this summer. Building in this extra capacity, space for people who decide to move over the years, was always part of the plan. The village is offering incentives, selling lots to flood-affected locals for $1. It’s still a good deal for the town. With more new housing, the tax base can begin to recover. The population has begun to rebound.
“It’s starting to turn a corner for us,” says Village President Heisz.
Alexandra Tempus
The new Rock Springs municipal building, community center, and library is a cornerstone of its relocation plan, which also includes a new apartment complex and a subdivision of duplex homes.
Meanwhile, progress continues apace on the new relocations. Viola has plans for eleven new single-family lots, two new apartment buildings, four new fourplexes, one duplex, and a “Phase 2” that includes dozens more single-family lots. Ontario’s development includes thirteen acres for single-family homes and eleven acres for commercial and industrial use. La Farge, home to just under 1,000 people and the headquarters of the Organic Valley food brand, has longer-term plans for sixty-nine new single-family lots.
There are other communities in the region that would like to do the same. Readstown, just up the road from Soldiers Grove and Gays Mills, occupies a narrow valley surrounded by bluffs, with little room for moving. Susan Mueller, the former village clerk, spoke with farmers nearby about purchasing land, but none wanted to sell. Tensions among farmers and villagers were high, but Mueller understood both perspectives.
“You have the people who lost their house in the flood wanting a place to move to,” she says. On the other hand, “Why should [farmers] give up their world because you live where you live?”
Mueller, who says she developed posttraumatic stress disorder in the aftermath of the floods, ended up leaving her post as town clerk. It’s a reminder that, despite catching on, relocation remains a fraught, even taboo, topic in places where the reality of climate change is still sinking in. But in the Driftless at least, a long history of adapting to meet the moment has allowed the concept to blossom.
Flood experts like those at the Association of State Floodplain Managers, which happens to be based in Wisconsin, hope the model takes off in other regions, too. The group’s executive director, Chad Berginnis, notes that most of the relocations that have happened so far have been in the Midwest. “I’m puzzled by that,” he said. “The need is arguably so much greater in our coastal areas.”
Driving through Rock Springs’ low-lying neighborhood along Narrows Creek, Busser and Zautke point out the empty lot where one historic home had stood “forever.” It was among eighteen homes that came down on these streets.
“It really looks different now,” Zautke says as we make our way around.
The last stop on our tour is the old fire station. After ninety village residents were displaced in 2008, Rock Springs no longer had the volunteers to sustain an entire fire department. Now it shares firefighting resources with neighboring communities, and keeps equipment in the new municipal building.
The old fire station is protected from flooding, high on a hill that overlooks the 1948 community center, and the sidewalk leading nowhere. Busser and Zautke envision a bar and restaurant on this spot someday. In fact, there is a plan to make this hill Rock Springs’ new commercial core, with fourteen available lots.
Busser points across the street where there’s a meadery that ferments honey and sells mead, and mentions a historic schoolhouse nearby where pottery is made. It’s still a ways off, but if you look long enough, you can almost see the village yet to be.