Moving On

Forty years ago, an epic flood pushed a tiny Wisconsin village to a new place on the map. In the age of climate change, it’s a model for the nation.

by

It was Fourth of July weekend, 1978, and The Brass Horn was hopping. The bar was one of six in the tiny village of Soldiers Grove, folded into a tight oxbow on the Kickapoo River in southwest Wisconsin.

The longtime owners, Laurel and Tolene George, regularly hosted a festive crowd: farmers who parked their trucks at the feed mill and dropped in for a few hands of euchre and teenagers like their grandson Steve, who swung by for a can of pop and a candy bar before dashing off to the pool hall with friends.

Main Street in those days was full of school kids bouncing from the dance hall to the theater. Couples would drive in from the farm and people-watch. This weekend was no exception, even though the Kickapoo was swollen and word was that it might flood. It was summertime, a holiday, and Steve George was finally old enough to drink. Besides, they were used to flooding in Soldiers Grove.

“Usually the old Kickapoo, it’d be every fall,” says George, now the village president, perched on a barstool in the motorcycle repair shop he’s operated since retiring. “Sometimes in the spring, too.”

Each year, they carried everything out of the waterlogged buildings, he says, washed everything down, and put it all back in again.

“We’d get all the grandkids down,” George remembers. “Everybody in town helped.”

But that Sunday, July 2, in 1978, things changed. A biblical downpour led to the largest flood in village history—bigger even than the legendary 1951 flood, when residents evacuated homes by boat from second-story windows. The water moved with such force it leveled a new concrete-block bank building and several others. On top of the regular floods, it made the cost of life on the Kickapoo, financial and otherwise, too much to bear.

Luckily the village had a plan, years in the making, to save itself—a plan that’s now a model for communities across America that, due to climate change, find themselves in the path of severe and repeated flooding. Soldiers Grove was going to dismantle its beloved Main Street altogether, pick up, and move.

A few years later, it was all over the national news. Not only had Soldiers Grove successfully relocated its downtown business district and a handful of homes, but—in light of the 1970s fuel crises—the new construction was powered by the sun. They dubbed it “Solar Town.”

“Future is Bright,” “Sunshine in Wisconsin,” “Good Move,” shouted headlines at major dailies around the region. Audubon profiled a “Flooded Village” that “Moves to a Solar Future.” Time reported on a small town in America’s Dairyland “Kicking the Kickapoo Habit.” Before long, Soldiers Grove even earned a spot on the Today Show.

And Solar Town was something to see. Instead of a traditional Main Street drag, the new part of town featured matching wood-sided buildings with built-in solar roofs—a library, a grocery store, a bank—arranged in a circle of streets with names like Sunshine Boulevard and Passive Sun Drive. It all fit on a 190-acre plot of old farmland tucked into the side of a rocky ridge far above the floodplain, a half-mile up from the old town where most of the residences remained.

Experts cite Soldiers Grove as the first relocation effort funded by government buyouts for home and business owners. And this became a template for relocating communities across the country. After the “Great Flood” of 1993, which spanned six states along the Mississippi River, the Wisconsin-based Association of State Floodplain Managers advised government agencies and Congress to look to Soldiers Grove, according to co-founder Larry Larson.

“It proved people would relocate if you gave them the option.” Larson says. “What was done in Soldiers Grove set the model for what could be used in the Midwest. Relocation became accepted as one of the alternatives.”

Soldiers Grove had seen regular floods since 1907, but the disaster of 1951 was its worst yet. The next year, Laurel and Tolene George would sell the other one of their two taverns, The Wonder Bar, to another family, the Herbsts. Highway 61, which brought travelers through town, was rerouted around it. Eventually, the ripple effects of 1951 would close a quarter of all businesses in town.

Floods have become the most common natural disaster, prompting other communities to seek funds to buy out homes, businesses, and other land, and move somewhere else.

In 1975 the Army Corps of Engineers, which had been studying flood-control options in the Kickapoo River valley for decades, finally proposed constructing a levee that, with a dam thirty-six miles upriver, would protect Soldiers Grove from floods. But the dam project faced environmental and legal challenges, and the costs of the levee were steep. So villagers offered up another option: move to higher ground.

The Corps of Engineers had previously deemed relocation “socially unacceptable.” Only a few U.S. communities had ever evacuated their floodplains, and perhaps none had involved such a coordinated, bottom-up effort to reconstruct an entire business district.

Yet financially, it made sense—factoring in annual flood damages to the town of $127,000 (nearly a half million dollars today), plus the costs of the levee, it was estimated that relocation would pay for itself in less than thirty years. The Corps of Engineers initially agreed to help, but withdrew after environmental concerns torpedoed the upriver dam project.

So Soldiers Grove moved forward on its own, with the help of architect and Chicago native Tom Hirsch, who the village hired as its relocation coordinator in 1974. Under Hirsch’s leadership, the village began the years-long process of pleading for funding from any state or federal agency that would listen—and changing hearts and minds among the villagers themselves.

“If you’re in a small Wisconsin town, doing something that breaks the mold,” Hirsch says, “that is very hard to pull off.”

“No one remembers any flooding in the early years of the community’s life,” wrote William S. Becker, the local newspaper editor who assembled a case study of the relocation for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.

Soldiers Grove was founded in 1856, a couple decades after 1,300 U.S. militia troops, including future President Zachary Taylor, camped in the area during their pursuit of Sauk leader Black Hawk.

“The typical river town was founded before there was a known history of flooding,” Becker continued in his case study, “before farmers and loggers cleared upriver land to increase runoff; before the installation of roads, buildings, parking lots and other ‘urban’ developments sent water cascading into rivers, causing more and more frequent flooding.”

Relocation was innovative because it was “nonstructural”—pushing back against decades of federal policy that favored engineered solutions like dams and levees. Instead, wrote Becker, relocation “gives the floodplain back to the river and regulates people rather than nature.”

These days, floods are escalating around the country for much the same reason they began in the first place. The environmental imbalance caused by more than a century of industrial development has warmed our planet so much that seas are rising and storms often bring a deluge. Floods have become the most common natural disaster, prompting other communities to seek funds to buy out homes, businesses, and other land, and move somewhere else.

This process is taking place on the sinking Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana, and being considered as an option for other coastal areas in that state. In Alaska this year, the federal government approved $1.7 million to buy out homes in the village of Newtok. Another Alaskan settlement, Shishmaref, voted two years ago to relocate but is still seeking funding.

Buyouts have occurred in New Orleans and other hard-hit areas after Hurricane Katrina, and are a part of Houston’s recovery plan following Hurricane Harvey. And this fall, Imperial Beach, a coastal town in Southern California, made headlines for a still-in-the-works relocation plan of the kind that “has never been done in the Western U.S. before.” Buyout programs to fight flooding exist in nearly every state.

Following Hurricane Sandy, New York and New Jersey funneled hundreds of millions into extensive buyout programs of their own.

“Barriers are at best an intermediate solution,” Klaus Jacob, a geophysicist at Columbia University told The New Yorker at the time. Instead, he said, communities would have to undertake “managed retreat.” “Walls will keep out storm surges, but not the rising ocean, and they could cause a sense of false security that prevents us from finding real solutions.”

To hear Tom Hirsch tell it, the relocation of Soldiers Grove almost didn’t happen.

While village leadership was largely onboard, many townspeople feared losing their downtown. Although Main Street had lost businesses over the years, it was still the heart and soul of the community.

“During warm weather,” observed an impact study conducted as part of the relocation effort, “outdoor benches and windowsills on Main Street are occupied by elderly men who migrate from one side of the street to the other with the sun and keep a watch over the day’s activities.”

As of the mid-1970s, the village’s population was aging and mostly low income. The relocation effort undertook a survey of residents, who said they wanted more jobs and a revitalized retail district. But they also wanted Soldiers Grove to remain a friendly place where everyone knew everyone else.

“If [relocation] seems like a simple and direct solution, it was not,” Becker wrote in his report. “It involved changing people’s lives and habits—always a touchy business.”

A committee formed that included resident members. Meetings were open to the public and publicized in the local paper. Eventually, the village decided to commit $90,000 to start the project itself, in a show of good faith that the rest of the funds would come through. The village president, thinking the move financially irresponsible, resigned in protest.

The fact that the relocation was community-driven is what made it successful, Hirsch says. Ultimately, the village’s willingness to invest in itself helped to convince federal officials.

Researchers Sherri Brokopp Binder and Alex Greer, experts on buyout programs, consider this key to their success. “We cannot overstate the importance of including local communities in the process,” they wrote in a 2016 paper. “Whether they are considered successful or unsuccessful in any given context, they are enormously disruptive. As such, we recommend that, at the local level, buyout programs be community-led.”

The other big factor in pulling the project off, Hirsch adds, is that by 1978 years of planning had already been done.

“We did not do our planning in a post-disaster situation,” he explains. “We did it in a pre-disaster situation when people were not stressed, when people were not out of their homes or businesses. That makes all the difference in the world.”

But it was a flood that catalyzed the much-needed funding. After years of trying to engage him, Soldiers Grove was finally able to enlist the support of William Proxmire, one of two Democrats representing Wisconsin in the U.S. Senate, in the wake of the 1978 disaster.

When Proxmire was touring the devastation, Hirsch hopped into a seat that opened up in Proxmire’s car. “He had questions about, ‘What was this relocation?’ ” Hirsch remembers. “And I was leaning forward over the front seat, just firing him responses as fast as he was giving us questions. Because we had our ducks in a row. And by the time we got to Soldiers Grove, he said, ‘This is pretty impressive.’ ”

Proxmire soon arranged for Hirsch and a couple other officials to meet with various agencies in Washington, D.C. By the time their plane landed back in Wisconsin, they got the news: the Department of Housing and Urban Development was granting Soldiers Grove just shy of a million dollars.

When it came time to relocate, Laurel and Tolene George took the buyout. Starting up The Brass Horn all over again was too much, says Steve George.

But the Herbst family, to whom the Georges had sold The Wonder Bar, decided to make the move.

“Once we relocated, we had the same crowd,” says Marty Herbst, whose parents, Marie and Ed, owned the place. “People thought, ‘Well, we just gotta be in the car another two minutes to get to the bar.’ ”

The Wonder Bar still exists in Solar Town. The pharmacy up there keeps weekend hours. Visitors filter in and out of the library. John’s TV & Sporting Goods has a cheery window display. But it’s different than it was before.

“You cannot just re-create exactly the same thing,” says Anamaria Bukvic, a research assistant professor at Virginia Tech who studies relocations. “It’s not like one day you pack everything in boxes and then the next day you have unity. It’s changing the fabric of their neighborhood or their small community.”

The big old IGA grocery store, although initially relocated, packed up and left years ago. Now, the Mobil station on the other side of the highway (also solar powered) provides the bare necessities; otherwise, folks drive out of town for groceries. Back in the old town, Main Street now runs through a park, with a playground, a baseball diamond, spots for campers who want to enjoy a shady spot by the river. But it’s quiet. The population, at 550, still hovers around 1970s levels.

Yet there is little doubt that relocation helped Soldiers Grove to survive this long. Steve George is as nostalgic as anyone for the old Main Street, but even he agrees. “It was sad, but it did make sense,” he says. “If we were going through this every year it’d have been too much.”

Especially when, in 2007 and 2008, the Kickapoo Valley was again inundated with back-to-back historic floods. This time around, the local art teacher asked her students to draw what they had seen, and had the drawings bound into a book. One seven-year-old drew herself and her father, faces twisted into frowns, in a boat atop massive waves, black clouds hovering overhead. One news report described a parking lot, after the flood, looking like “a hastily cut chocolate cake.”

By 2010, Marty Herbst was using flood mitigation funds to elevate the stately white home where he and his wife raised four children. With its sprawling front porch and roof gable painted to look like the sun, the house is now three feet higher than when they bought it in the aftermath of the 1978 flood. At their previous home, the water had come up “over the kitchen sink.”

“The flooding is just part of living in a small town along the Kickapoo River,” Herbst says.

The people of Gays Mills know this well. After the 2007 and 2008 floods, the village just downriver from Soldiers Grove finally followed its lead. With funds from FEMA and HUD, it bought out homeowners who were tired of year after year flooding. Today, in the new part of town built on a hill, you can drive up Sunset Ridge Avenue, past a row of elevated homes, and back down the other side on Misty Valley Avenue.

But as with Soldiers Grove, part of the town remains in its original location. Steve George’s bike club, Society’s Sons, which sits on Main Street in Gays Mills, has marked the waterline on the wall for each flood over the years. This year, with another historic flood in August 2018, it reached its highest mark yet—more than two feet higher than in 2008.

“Let’s put it like this,” says Lee Ruegg, a longtime Gays Mills resident and Steve George’s common-law sister-in-law. “People who never saw water in their homes, ever, had water.”

Throughout the night of the 2018 flood, Ruegg says the village of Gays Mills called her cell phone over and over, trying to get her to evacuate. She’s lived in her house near the river for almost thirty years, and, like Marty Herbst, elevated it after the last record disaster a decade ago. In the end, she didn’t leave until 8 a.m. the following morning, hopping in the boat she had tied to her deck.

“I have a route that I take because I’m used to the flooding,” she says.

In the days that followed the 2018 flood, Steve George’s cell phone never stopped ringing either. Damage to Soldiers Grove tallied $500,000. At one point George, watching from the distance, saw the blacktop peel up from the parking lot that had been demolished into “chocolate cake” a decade prior.

“It looked like the tail of a whale,” he says. “You’d see a big piece come up and plop down over.”

Meanwhile, Gays Mills is considering additional relocation in the wake of the 2018 floods. Though Ruegg elevated her home a year ago, at least a foot of water still found its way inside. But she, like many longtime residents, is determined to stay put. She’s made the necessary preparations: The kitchen table has metal legs, the coffee table is glass. Her furniture is made of real wood that can survive a soaking. Ruegg has put so much time and money and memories into her home, she says, that there’s no way she’d ever move.

In research conducted in New York and New Jersey neighborhoods after Hurricane Sandy, scholars Brokopp Binder and Greer found that decisions to leave or to stay depend to a large degree on attachment to place. Deep roots in a particular place—compared to, say, a certain kind of dwelling—make the decision to move more difficult.

But experts say buyout programs are on the rise—and Congress passed a spending bill in March that appropriated billions to the FEMA and HUD programs that administer them. And of course, floods associated with both sea level rise and extreme rainfall are projected to worsen as climate change escalates.

For now, Marty Herbst is staying put in the now-elevated home where he’s lived for forty years. But, he adds, “If it hits the main floor of this house then we’ll probably move to higher ground. Who knows, we might have a 10,000-year flood coming up next year. We’ve had a 50-year, 100-year, 500-year, 1,000-year flood.”

In Solar Town, the donation jar the bar put out for this summer’s flood victims has filled up. But back down in the old town, where Steve George and everyone else used to drop in at The Brass Horn, it’s still and quiet, aside from tattered American flags on each lamppost, flapping in the breeze. The baseball diamond is washed out, and chunks of asphalt have been tossed clear across the street. Water is pooled up under the playground equipment, debris that swept in with the flood caught in the empty swings. Yellow tape surrounding the park reads, “Do Not Cross.” And because nobody lives here anymore, no one has to.