When an American town leaves a floodplain, it usually leaves after the water has already come through. Valmeyer, Illinois, started planning its move to higher ground in the fall of 1993, once the Mississippi had displaced its residents and ruined its buildings. An informal ballot that September drew 239 responses, two-thirds of them for relocation. Roughly 60 percent of the original population eventually moved to the new site, with about $31 million in public funding behind them.
That is the pattern. Destruction first, then the scattering, then somebody organizes a vote, then federal money arrives to rebuild somewhere safer.
Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, did it in a different order. In 1975, three years before the flood that would prove the point, the village began planning to move its commercial district out of the Kickapoo River's floodplain. It bought land. It extended water and sewer lines. It spent its own money while the shops on Main Street were open and the river sat quietly in its banks.
How that happened, and why almost nobody has managed it since, is a story about specific people in a narrow valley. It is also a story about what the federal government is built to pay for, and what it isn't.
The arithmetic that started everything
The Kickapoo runs through a tight valley in southwestern Wisconsin, and Soldiers Grove sat where the valley floor met the water. Downtown had flooded again and again. Mabel Shepard was seventy-nine when Time interviewed her in 1981; she had been rescued along with her disabled daughter shortly before their house was carried off in the 1951 flood.
The Army Corps of Engineers had been planning a levee for the village for years. The price was approximately $3.5 million in 1975 dollars. Everything the wall would protect — every building, every lot behind it — was assessed at less than $1 million. The village's share of construction came to roughly $220,000, and it would owe all the maintenance after that, estimated at $10,000 a year. The village collected $14,000 a year in taxes.
So: a wall costing three and a half times the value of what stood behind it, upkeep that would swallow most of the village budget, and the Corps was going to build it anyway. Not out of stubbornness. That was what federal flood-control money existed to fund. The levee had a line in the budget. Relocation did not.
In January 1975, a local businesswoman — the accessible record does not give her name — took a petition around to the owners of the shops and offices on Main Street. Thirty of the thirty-nine commercial property owners signed it. Fifteen of twenty-two floodplain homeowners signed. So did five of the seven village board members. Nobody was committing to move. They were agreeing to ask whether moving might make more sense than a wall whose own numbers argued against it.
Bill Becker, who published the local paper, wrote up a thirteen-page memorandum setting out three options: do nothing, take the Corps levee, or relocate the flood-prone business district to higher ground. With the approval of Village President Cecil Turk and the board, Becker sent the memo to the Corps in late January.
The Corps had, until then, treated relocation as socially unacceptable — the assumption being that people would not agree to leave. The petition was evidence against that assumption. About two months later, the Corps said relocation could substitute for the levee if it proved economical and socially acceptable.
The people who disagreed, and why they weren't wrong
Mabel Shepard, who knew as well as anyone what the Kickapoo could do, opposed the relocation. Her objection was about distance: the new commercial site sat too far from the residential streets where she lived. Other residents pointed out that the next major flood might be seventy-five years off. Some still preferred the levee.
Those objections were not confusion about the numbers. Relocation asked people to accept immediate, concrete costs in exchange for protection against something that might not arrive in their lifetimes. The levee, whatever its absurd arithmetic, promised to leave everything where it was. Someone who had already rebuilt once and expected another twenty years could reasonably conclude that the levee was the better bet for her, even if it was a bad bet for the village.
The familiar arrangement is hard to give up. The grocery stays put, the walk to the post office is the same walk, and your customers already know where to find you.
Tom Hirsch, a Chicago-born architect who had moved into the Kickapoo Valley, was hired as relocation coordinator in 1975 through a federal employment-training grant. He ran surveys, put business owners in touch with university counselors and Small Business Administration lending help, and started turning Becker's memo into something buildable. Ron Swiggum, who owned the meat-locker plant on Main Street and sat on the village board, became village president by 1978.
The village passed a formal resolution supporting relocation in 1976. In 1977 it borrowed $90,000, bought higher ground, and began extending water and sewer. Business owners pooled $3,300 for planning. State agencies chipped in small planning grants. For a village of 547 people these were modest sums, but they were physical. There was land, and there were pipes in it, before anything happened to prove the decision right.
Five feet on Main Street
The storm sat over the Kickapoo basin from July 1 through July 5, 1978. At Soldiers Grove, five to six feet of water moved through downtown. The current took out a recently built concrete-block bank. Damage to the business district came to roughly $500,000. Two deaths were recorded across the basin, though available federal records do not say whether either occurred in Soldiers Grove. Swiggum's meat-locker plant was destroyed.
The flood did not produce the relocation plan. It sped up one that already existed, and Hirsch later said it changed a lot of residents' minds. It also gave Senator William Proxmire something to look at. He toured the damage, asked Hirsch about the plan already on paper, and within about a month called Hirsch and Swiggum to Washington.
What Proxmire walked through was not simply a wrecked downtown. It was a wrecked downtown belonging to a village that had already bought the land, started the utilities, and put $90,000 of its own borrowed money behind a decision made three years earlier. Those meetings produced a $900,000 commitment from the Department of Housing and Urban Development in the fall of 1978, with more HUD awards over the next three years.
The village had landed in a gap it could not have planned for. After the disaster declaration, federal rules would not let owners simply take disaster money and rebuild in the floodplain. But no standard federal program existed to relocate an intact commercial district before it was destroyed, either. Soldiers Grove was too organized for conventional disaster relief and too unprecedented for any existing relocation category.
Building a project out of twelve different programs
The documented cost of the relocation was $6,575,131, assembled between 1975 and 1981 from at least a dozen separate sources. The largest was HUD's Community Development Block Grant program: six awards totaling $3.17 million, arriving between October 1978 and May 1981. The village borrowed nearly $2 million through municipal bonds, tax-increment financing — a mechanism that lets a town borrow against the future property taxes a new development is expected to generate — and Farmers Home Administration loans. The Department of the Interior put in $646,000 from the Land and Water Conservation Fund to buy the old downtown and turn it into parkland. The Economic Development Administration added $500,000. The governor's discretionary funds covered $168,000 of sewer and water extensions. State planning agencies gave amounts in the low thousands.
Every one of those sources came with its own application, its own eligibility rules, its own reporting requirements, its own clock. Hirsch and Becker and the village board had to make them behave as a single project. And the $6.575 million figure excludes Hirsch's salary, donated labor, technical assistance, and the private mortgages business owners took on to cover what the public money didn't reach.
That last exclusion is where the arithmetic stops being municipal. Acquisition programs pay fair market value for what you had, plus a capped supplement toward what a replacement costs. Time reported one case: the village bought Cecil Turk's old IGA grocery building for $84,000, but building a comparable store on the new site ran an estimated $220,000. Federal rules allowed only $50,000 in replacement assistance above market value. Manager Richard Turk financed the remaining $86,000 himself. Getting a check did not make participating painless. Each owner who moved absorbed whatever distance was left between what the programs covered and what the move actually cost, and nobody was keeping a tally of that.
Laurel and Tolene George took the acquisition payment for the Brass Horn tavern and did not reopen. Starting over was too much. Marie and Ed Herbst moved the Wonder Bar; their son Marty later said the customers followed, since the new location added only a short drive. Rod Olsen, who had run a gas station, built at the new site and spent years wondering whether leaving the old Main Street had been right.
The village president who authorized that first $90,000 in borrowing reportedly resigned afterward, on the grounds that it was financially irresponsible. The accessible record does not name him. But committing a large share of a tiny village's borrowing capacity to land for a relocation with no guaranteed federal funding, against a flood that might hold off for decades — whoever made that call was going to live with it either way.
Solar buildings on higher ground
The new commercial district came with a requirement that had nothing to do with water. Every building had to get at least 50 percent of its heat from the sun. Village ordinances protected solar access from being blocked by later construction and set thermal standards described as twice as strict as the Wisconsin building code.
More than twenty solar-designed buildings went up — fire station, medical center, grocery, bank. The approaches varied: south-facing glass, thermal mass to hold daytime heat, insulated shutters, waste heat pulled off refrigeration equipment. All of them had to clear the 50 percent threshold. The Christian Science Monitor reported that Cecil Turk's new grocery used refrigeration waste heat along with fiberglass solar collectors, and that its gas backup had reportedly gone unused through temperatures around twenty below. The added solar construction cost was about $7,000.
The first winter also brought trouble. Heating failed at the medical clinic because the people inside were not operating its insulated shutters correctly. A passive solar building asks things of its occupants that a furnace does not: close the shutters at dusk, open them in the morning, pay attention to what the building is doing. The design works when someone works it, and the design documents rarely say who that someone is or what happens on a day they are short-staffed.
By 2003, a Solar Today retrospective found that age, neglect, and thin follow-up support had cut performance in some buildings, while most still functioned as working solar examples. That remains the latest project-wide assessment anyone has been able to locate. No audited building-by-building energy study after 2003 turns up in the Department of Energy, DNR, scholarly, or municipal record. The buildings are still standing; whether their solar systems still do what they were built to do is not documented.
What stayed behind
The old Main Street was bought up and mostly demolished. The riverfront became municipal parkland — campground, playground, ball fields, a veterans memorial. The Beauford T. Anderson Campground now runs thirty-five campsites across what used to be the commercial district.
The park keeps flooding. In 2008 the water scoured the old Main Street area, uncovered basement fill and broken glass, and tore up pavement. In 2018 it flooded again. What the river damaged both times was replaceable recreation infrastructure rather than a block of shops, offices, and livelihoods.
The houses are a different matter. Most village homes never moved. Siders reports that twelve residences near the edges of the floodplain were elevated or floodproofed. Homes along Pine Street and in the low-lying area residents call the Flat stayed exposed, and were evacuated or repaired after later floods. Marty Herbst, whose family relocated the Wonder Bar to the new site, went on living in an older house near the river and eventually raised it about three feet with mitigation money. The commercial district got out of the water. A good share of the people who worked in it did not.
The business results resist a clean reading. Tobin's 1992 follow-up counted eight businesses lost over the relocation period — a restaurant, a grocery, the meat-locker plant, a laundromat, three bars, and the local newspaper — and seven gained, among them a dental clinic, a pharmacy, and a restaurant-hotel. "Lost" doesn't mean relocation alone closed each one. "Gained" doesn't mean the new business belonged to anyone who had been downtown before. In Tobin's survey, 76 percent of residents believed the total number of businesses had fallen. Residents of the Flats and the hillsides were likelier to say that getting to services had gotten harder after the commercial center moved — which was Mabel Shepard's objection, raised years earlier, when she said the new site was too far from the people who would need it most.
The IGA reopened in its new solar building. It later closed. By 2018 the gas station was the village's main source of groceries.
The same numbers, fifty years on
Studies with the shape of Soldiers Grove's 1975 arithmetic are still being written. A 2022 Army Corps screening of Rhode Island coastal protection options looked at a $43.75 million levee and bulkhead system for the Fields Point neighborhood in Providence. Spread over the life of the project, it would cost about $1.66 million a year and prevent an estimated $568,704 a year in damage — thirty-four cents of avoided damage per dollar spent. The Corps dropped it from consideration.
That is a different comparison from the one Soldiers Grove faced, which set the levee's cost directly against the assessed value of the buildings behind it. But the situation underneath is the same: protection that fails its own economic test. And when the Corps screens out a protection project, nothing steps into its place. The community is left holding a finding that the wall doesn't pencil out, and no federal program built to fund whatever comes after that finding.
Soldiers Grove fell into that gap in 1975, and it is still open. Federal disaster money is organized around response — what gets done once the water has come through. Moving first means assembling funds from programs each designed for something else, swallowing the gaps none of them cover, and doing it while the shops are open and the skeptics have a defensible case that the flood might be seventy-five years out.
What Soldiers Grove had going for it was mostly particular people. Becker could frame the choice in thirteen pages. Hirsch, hired through a federal jobs program, could work full-time for years on planning and grant applications in a village that could never have paid for that position. The village president borrowed against an uncertain future and apparently resigned over it. Proxmire walked the damage and made a personal introduction to HUD. And business owners signed a petition, took out mortgages, and covered the $86,000 that the rules stopped short of.
The flood's timing mattered as much as anything. Two years earlier and there would have been no land, no utilities, no coordinator, nothing to show Proxmire. Five years later and the petition's momentum might have gone, the coordinator's grant might have run out, the village president might have been someone who wanted the levee.
The reason so few communities have repeated this is not a shortage of foresight. The federal system pays for walls, and it pays for rebuilding after walls fail. The space in between — where a town reads the numbers, makes a plan, and needs money to act before the river confirms it — has no dedicated program and no budget line. Filling it required a village of 547 people to become a grant-writing office, a construction manager, and a translator among a dozen agencies whose programs were never built to hand anything to one another.
The campground on the old Main Street floods every few years, and the village repairs it. The commercial district on the hill stays dry. The families who couldn't afford to reopen never reopened, and the streets near the river still take water. The arithmetic was right in 1975 and it is right now. What it cost the people of Soldiers Grove to act on it, in the years before the river made the argument for them, is the part nobody has figured out how to make ordinary.
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Mobile homes complicate relocation: A September 2026 ProPublica and Assembly investigation shows how split ownership between a mobile home and the land beneath it can block or redirect a buyout, sharply complicating the kind of community relocation Soldiers Grove and Valmeyer attempted.
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Alaska villages fail cost-benefit tests: GAO found that imminently threatened Alaska Native villages commonly fail Corps cost-effectiveness screening because their infrastructure value is lower than proposed protection costs, a version of the Soldiers Grove arithmetic playing out in communities with even fewer resources to pursue alternatives.
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Valmeyer's "vote" was provisional: Contemporaneous accounts variously describe the September 1993 tally as 239 returned ballots, meeting attendees, or property owners present, with respondents saying they were "interested in moving Valmeyer" rather than consenting to the financial and institutional terms that followed.
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Who didn't participate remains undocumented: The peer-reviewed reconstruction of both relocations is far stronger on completed buildings and visible boosters than on renters, opponents, closed businesses, unsuccessful loan applicants, and people who left town.