On September 8, 1993, the people of Valmeyer, Illinois, voted on whether to give up their town and build it again on top of a bluff. Almost none of them were in Valmeyer when they voted.
The Mississippi had come through the levee that summer, and the bottomland village of 897 was still underwater or still unreachable. Families were sleeping in relatives' houses, some as far as St. Louis. Others were in a FEMA mobile-home settlement outside Waterloo that residents themselves called FEMAville. Later research found households still in trailers or rentals as long as two years afterward. So the vote on where the town should sit was taken by people who could not stand in it.
The Associated Press reported that 66 percent of 239 tabulated ballots favored moving to higher ground, and that number is close to the entirety of what the accessible record actually settles. Whether this was a binding referendum confined to registered voters, an advisory ballot the village ran itself, or a poll of property owners is not documented. Neither the ballot instrument nor the village minutes that would say so have surfaced. A University of Illinois Extension survey conducted roughly six weeks after the flood found about 60 percent of property owners wanting out of the floodplain, but that was a different exercise asking a different population, and it shouldn't be folded into the September count.
Three futures were genuinely open. Rebuilding in the bottoms remained legal, though future federal assistance would require replacement structures to sit some twelve to sixteen feet up, meaning a town on stilts instead of the town that washed away. Taking a buyout on your own and landing wherever a house happened to be for sale, in Waterloo, in Columbia, wherever. Or moving as a town onto ground that nobody in Valmeyer yet owned.
Manda and colleagues' 2023 review of buyout outcomes records village leaders treating that middle option as a threat to the tax base and to Valmeyer's survival as an incorporated place at all. Households that scatter take the levy with them, and once they've gone there is no municipality left to do any planning. More than a hundred residents eventually sat on seven planning committees, and the same review finds those committees busy with the mechanics of getting the move done rather than with the question of how it would land on a renter versus an owner, or on a business versus a household.
High ground existed nearby, and it was for sale. That precondition quietly settles more of these stories than any deliberation does. That October a nonprofit development corporation formed for the purpose contracted for roughly 500 acres of dairy farmland about two miles from the old town and some 400 feet above it. Reporting in March 1994 described the site as 485 acres with 190 lots already sold. The $3 million purchase price that gets repeated everywhere sits next to about $3.25 million in bonds and loans tangled up with mineral-rights questions involving a neighboring quarry, and no deed or closing statement has been located that would reconcile any of it. Groundbreaking came in December 1993, ahead of the finished federal packages; a 1994 state workshop record still shows Valmeyer's application waiting on an environmental assessment.
Soldiers Grove had financed the first years of its move on village borrowing because there was nothing to apply to. By 1993 there was. The Stafford Act of 1988 had created FEMA's hazard mitigation grant program, a standing pot of money that opens after a declared disaster, and it had been used to buy out flood-prone property for the first time shortly before the Great Flood arrived. Put that alongside the National Flood Insurance Program's authority to acquire property, Illinois matching funds, and the congressional supplementals appropriated for a nine-state catastrophe, and Valmeyer had machinery to feed. Soldiers Grove had been obliged to invent its own.
The machinery bought the old town.
| Acquired in the buyout | |
|---|---|
| Residences | 302 |
| Businesses | 29 |
| Churches | 3 |
| Total parcels | 334 |
| Reported cost, at pre-flood market value | $11,763,172 |
A project ledger reproduced in Pinter's 2021 survey of American community relocations totals about $31 million, but it comes from written information supplied by former mayor Dennis Knobloch and mixes funding sources in with cost lines. The two figures are counting different things.
The first family moved up in April 1995, nineteen months after the vote, and most infrastructure was working by that December. The new K–12 school, roughly 100,000 square feet at a reported $10.7 million, opened in the spring of 1996 with passive solar design and ground-source heat pumps. It runs still; federal education records list all three programs on the campus for 2024–25. Its building controls, by then about twenty-five years old, were replaced in 2023 after temperature and air-quality problems, and whether the original geothermal loops are still in service isn't documented anywhere a reader can reach. Of everything Valmeyer rebuilt, the school is the one structure whose condition somebody has been legally obliged to keep records about. That is why we know it needed work.
Roughly 530 people, about 60 percent of the pre-flood population, went up the bluff. Around 250 ended up in other towns. Twenty-six occupied residences turned the buyout down, and a 2018 field survey still counted twenty-seven households down in the bottoms.
Businesses fared worse than households. About a quarter of the old commercial community made the move; a bank, a restaurant, a pub, a salon, and a barber are among those recorded as never opening again. Pinter calls the relocated town's commercial sector eventually robust. Manda's review points at vacant storefronts and years of failing to land a grocery store. Different criteria, different evidence, both sitting in the literature.
The census counted 897 in 1990 and 608 in 2000, and that second number was taken five years after the first family moved up, catching the town mid-transfer. Then 1,263 in 2010 and 1,233 in 2020, a rebound built substantially of newcomers, not of people coming back. The purchased bottomland is deed-restricted open space now, much of it leased to local farmers to keep municipal maintenance costs down, with two dozen unacquired houses still standing out among the fields.
Thirty years on, a peer-reviewed journal was still auditing what that ballot did, and Manda's audit is blunt about where the sources run out. The deliberation, the dissent, and where the displaced households actually ended up are the thinnest parts of a story otherwise recorded in fine detail. Renters and low-income residents thinnest of all. The 66 percent endures because a body was assigned to count it. Nobody in particular was ever assigned to the 250.