She Put a Deposit on Lot 214 in a Cornfield That Doesn't Have a Road Yet

In the fall of 1994, roughly 900 people who had once lived in Valmeyer, Illinois, were scattered across FEMA trailer parks, relatives' spare bedrooms, and apartments in towns they'd never planned to inhabit. Fourteen months earlier, the Mississippi River had swallowed their town. Thirteen months earlier, about two-thirds of those who showed up to a community meeting had voted to move Valmeyer to higher ground. Now the new town site was a 500-acre former cornfield laced with red dirt roads and construction trailers.¹ The school was operating out of the Monroe County fairgrounds for a second year.² The rent-free FEMA trailers had roughly six to nine months left on their clocks.³

The historical record from this period preserves mayors, principals, committee chairs, and the occasional family willing to talk to visiting journalists. It does not preserve the private deliberations of the roughly 40 percent of original residents who ultimately did not make the move to New Valmeyer.⁴ The following conversation never took place. Gail Merschdorf is not a real person. But every condition she describes — the trailer, the lot, the school, the timeline, the math — is documented in the contemporaneous record. Where that record thins, we say so.

You voted yes at the September meeting. What did you think you were voting for?

Gail: Permission. I thought I was voting for permission. Like, "Yes, go ahead and look into it." Nobody handed me a purchase agreement. Dennis Knobloch stood up there and said, "Do you want to try this?" and people clapped and some people cried, and I raised my hand because what was I going to do, raise my hand for "no, let's go back to the mud"?

That was September of '93. It's now October of '94. And somewhere between "yes, let's try this" and right now, I apparently committed to buying Lot 214 in a cornfield that doesn't have a road to it yet.

When did the lot purchase happen?

Gail: Spring. March, maybe April. They were selling lots to pay off the land.⁵ My husband was on a run to Memphis, I think. I went to the meeting, Dennis is up front with the maps, and the feeling in the room is: if you don't put your name down now, you might not get a spot. So I put the deposit down. A few hundred dollars, I don't even remember exactly. Then I came home to the trailer and sat there thinking, what did I just do.

What's the trailer like?

Gail: A white box in a field next to other white boxes. The kids call it FEMAville. Everybody calls it FEMAville.

Look, I'm grateful. I know I'm supposed to say that, and I actually am. But it's been fourteen months. My oldest is twelve and she shares a room the size of a closet with her nine-year-old sister, and they fight about everything because there is nowhere to go. My son sleeps on a foldout in what they call the living room, which is also the kitchen, which is also where I try to do the bills after they're asleep. You learn a lot about a marriage in 400 square feet. Mostly you learn to do your arguing in whispers.

Tell me about the school situation.

Gail: The school is the reason we're still here. Full stop. If they'd shut the school down after the flood, we'd be in Waterloo or Columbia or somewhere with actual walls.⁶

It's at the county fairgrounds. My kids go to school where they used to hold tractor pulls.⁷ The teachers put up a flagpole and a bell, and honestly, it works better than it has any right to. The basketball team practices at six-thirty in the morning in a borrowed gym somewhere because there's no gym at the fairgrounds.² My daughter won a soil-judging ribbon last month. Future Farmers of America. Tenth year in a row the school's won that.² So it's still a school. It's still their school.

What does your husband think about all this?

Gail: He's on the road four days a week. He thinks whatever I tell him to think.

That's not fair. He thinks it'll work out. He says, "Gail, they're building it, it's happening." And I say, "What's happening? Show me a street. Show me a grocery store." Schneider's already moved their operation to Waterloo.⁸ The biggest employer moved up to the new site, but that's one business.⁸ One business and a lot of optimism and a flagpole.

Sandy Thompson, another Valmeyer parent, told a reporter she was moving to Dallas because taxes in the new town would be "outrageous."³ Does that worry you?

Gail: Sandy's not wrong about the math. Somebody has to pay for all those streets and sewers. If half the town doesn't come back, and I'll tell you, it is not looking like everybody's coming back, then the people who do come back split the bill fewer ways.

But Sandy could move to Dallas because her husband had a job lined up. We don't have a job lined up somewhere else. We have a lot in a cornfield.

What would it take for you to walk away from the lot?

Gail: If I knew the Muellers weren't coming. If I knew the school was going to fold. If I sat down with the mortgage numbers one more time and they just refused to behave.

Here's what nobody talks about. We got the buyout on the old house. Pre-flood assessed value, which, this was Valmeyer, so we're not talking about a windfall here.⁹ Now I'm supposed to use that money to build a brand-new house on a lot I already paid for, in a town that doesn't exist yet, and somehow come out ahead? I've done the math on the kitchen table three times. It doesn't come out clean.

What does "clean" look like?

Do you think it'll work?

Gail: (long pause)

Ask me in a year.

That's what you said last year.

Gail: Yeah. I know.

A note on what the record holds and what it doesn't: The financial terms facing individual Valmeyer households — specific lot prices, buyout amounts, mortgage terms, duplication-of-benefits calculations — are not publicly documented at the household level.¹⁰ Whether FEMA extended trailer deadlines for families who couldn't complete construction in time is unclear; a June 1995 report found residents still in trailers two full years after the flood, suggesting either extensions were granted or families found other arrangements.¹¹ The roughly 40 percent of original residents who did not relocate to New Valmeyer left almost no trace in the contemporaneous reporting. Gail Merschdorf stands at that threshold. Not because the record tells us what she decided, but because it doesn't.

Footnotes

1. Kathy Lohr, NPR, 1994 visit to Valmeyer site; described in NPR transcript, 2008. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/91769838 ↩

2. Drew Lindsay, "After the Flood," Education Week / Teacher Magazine, November 1, 1994. https://www.edweek.org/education/after-the-flood/1994/11 ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

3. Laurel Shaper Walters, "No More Rowboats on Main Street," Christian Science Monitor, May 8, 1994. https://www.csmonitor.com/1994/0508/31101.html ↩ ↩²

4. Anne R. Siders, "The Lost History of Managed Retreat and Community Relocation in the United States," Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene 9(1), 2021. https://online.ucpress.edu/elementa/article/9/1/00036/118392/ ↩

5. Walters, CSM, 1994: "We're selling lots back to the residents so they're paying for the land acquisition themselves." ↩

6. Mayor Dennis Knobloch, quoted in Education Week, 1994: "The school has been the only thing that we've had as a constant through all of this." ↩

7. Lindsay, Education Week, 1994: The fairgrounds was "home to the county's tractor-pulls, demolition derbies, and cattle shows." ↩

8. Rachel Hellman, "'A City Upon a Hill,'" Belt Magazine, May 14, 2021. https://beltmag.com/valmeyer-illinois-city-hill-mississippi-flood/ ↩ ↩²

9. FEMA buyouts were at pre-flood assessed market value. FEMA Case Study: https://www.fema.gov/case-study/valmeyer-acquisitions-buyouts-create-open-space ↩

10. Specific household-level financial terms require village records not available in published sources. See International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 95 (2023): 103863. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212420923003436 ↩

11. "After 1993 Flood, Relocated Illinois Town Battles to Rebuild," Seattle Times, June 4, 1995. ↩