Soldiers Grove Asked for a Study and Got a New Downtown

In the mid-1970s, most of the commercial property owners on the low ground in Soldiers Grove, Wisconsin, signed a paper asking the government to study moving their downtown up the hill. The study was the cheap part.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had a levee for Soldiers Grove, and like most things the federal government offers a small town, it came with an invoice.

Soldiers Grove sits on the Kickapoo River in the hill country of southwest Wisconsin. In the early 1970s its business district sat on the floodplain, the flat ground the river spreads across when it rises, and the Kickapoo rose a lot. The Corps, which builds most of the flood walls in this country, drew up a long earthen wall to keep the water out.

According to a FEMA retrospective, the levee would cost $3.5 million. The village would put in $220,000 toward construction and then about $10,000 a year to keep it up. Everything on the floodplain behind that wall was worth less than $1 million. The village took in $14,000 a year in property taxes, all told. The village's own history puts the upkeep at twice that. Take either figure and you've got a village of shopkeepers handing over most of its tax money, year after year, to maintain a wall worth more than three times what it was guarding.

Then a businesswoman from the low part of town started carrying a sheet of paper around.

What the paper asked for

The best account comes from William Becker, who worked on the project and later wrote its history for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources. In Come Rain, Come Shine he leaves the woman unnamed but tells us what she was carrying: a petition asking the Corps to "give relocation thorough study as an alternative to the proposed levee."

He kept the count, too. Thirty of the 39 commercial property owners on the floodplain signed. So did 15 of its 22 homeowners, and five of the seven people on the village board. Call it three merchants in four, two homeowners in three, and just about everybody who ran the place.

Look at what they actually signed. They asked for a study of an alternative. No site had been picked and no money found, so nobody knew what the village would pay for an old store, what a new one would run, who'd lend the difference, or what became of the mortgage on a building the village bought out from under it. Those questions had no answers yet, because there wasn't anything yet to put a price on. Anybody who's stood outside a grocery with a clipboard knows the easy signature is the one that doesn't commit a fellow to anything he could write down, and a study is about as close to nothing as government gets.

I'd like to follow those thirty merchants and fifteen homeowners from that sheet to wherever they landed. Becker kept the totals and not the names, though, and the petition itself hasn't shown up in print since. Why the other nine commercial owners and seven homeowners kept their pens in their pockets, the record doesn't say. Maybe they were against moving. Maybe they were out of town that week, or didn't care for whoever was asking. Turning down a request for a study doesn't tell you much about a man.

The village signs for everybody

The petition wasn't the only paper making the rounds. Late in January 1975, Becker records, a separate memo went to the Corps with the support of the village board and of a man named Cecil Turk. His name is on the memo, not the petition. He'll come back.

From there the commitments started stacking up, and they quit belonging to the people who'd signed.

A federal job-training grant paid for a relocation coordinator to run the planning. Upstream, the Corps had been building a big dam at La Farge that was supposed to tame floods down the whole valley, and money to move Soldiers Grove had been proposed as part of that job. Construction stopped in July 1975, and geologist Nicholas Pinter's reconstruction dates the final cancellation to 1977. When the dam went, the town's moving money went with it.

The village kept at it anyway. In December 1976 the board resolved that relocation was a long-range community goal. In June 1977 it approved borrowing $90,000 to get one site ready for industry and set another aside for shops. Water and sewer lines started up the hill that year.

That first $90,000 was general-obligation debt, which is a dressed-up way of saying the village promised to pay it back out of property taxes. Every owner in Soldiers Grove stood behind it: the thirty, the nine, and everybody already living up on the hill, who nobody had asked because they didn't own floodplain property. By 1981, according to Pinter's financing table, the village had borrowed $1,988,000 for the move. The published accounts don't spell out how each later loan was secured, but they were the village's debts. The petitioners didn't owe them any more than anybody else did.

That's about nine times the village's construction share of the levee it turned down. The comparison is rough. The levee number leaves out upkeep, and the move bought land, streets, pipe and a whole new downtown instead of a wall. Still, nobody who signed that sheet agreed to nearly two million dollars, and nobody could have, because the number hadn't been invented yet. It got put together one board vote at a time, and every vote made sense once you'd taken the one before it.

Six feet of water

On July 2, 1978, the Kickapoo came into town hard. A Corps historian recorded nearly six feet of water on Main Street. The village history says the flood did about $500,000 in damage and wrecked several buildings, including the bank's new concrete-block building. While the town was busy studying how to get off the floodplain, somebody had gone and put up a brand-new bank on it. The study hadn't bound anybody, the bank included.

A federal disaster declaration, which is what opens the door to federal aid, came on July 7. That October the Department of Housing and Urban Development committed the first of its community development grants, and federal money kept coming every year through 1981. Add in the village's own borrowing and Pinter puts the total financing for the move at about $6.6 million, in the dollars of the day.

All that planning had put the village first in line for the money: when the flood brought federal funding, the plan was already sitting on the table. The flood also sped up the clock. People who'd signed a request for a study a few years back were now standing in ruined stores trying to decide whether to sell.

The grocer's arithmetic

Selling and rebuilding is where the cost finally gets a single owner's name on it. The village bought floodplain property at fair market value, meaning whatever it would bring on the open market. Wisconsin law tacked on a replacement benefit, an extra payment to help an owner afford a comparable building somewhere else. It sounds generous right up until somebody puts numbers in it, and in January 1981 Time did.

The village paid $84,000 for the old IGA, one of a chain of independently owned groceries. A comparable new store was estimated at $220,000. The replacement benefit maxed out at $50,000. That left the grocery $86,000 to come up with on its own. Time talked to Richard Turk, who managed the place. Two months later the Christian Science Monitor named the owner: Cecil Turk, the same man behind that 1975 memo.

The new downtown also came with rules the old one never had. New business, industrial and village buildings were supposed to get at least half their heat from the sun. Turk figured the solar setup in his attic added $7,000. The store also caught the heat coming off its own refrigerator cases and kept a gas furnace for backup. It was clever engineering, the kind the late seventies were fond of for a little while, and it got paid for out of a grocery's margins, which have never been much thicker than a dime.

So follow the one early name the record lets you follow. Nobody can show Turk was one of the thirty, since the businesswoman's sheet never turned up; his name is on the other piece of paper. In January 1975 he put it behind a request. By 1981 his store sat in a new building up the hill that cost roughly two and a half times what the village paid for the old one, with sunshine in the attic and $86,000 to cover. Those are a magazine's reported estimates. His closing papers, his final construction bill and his interest payments have never been published. They're still the closest thing on record to an itemized receipt for "looking into relocation."

Who reopened and who didn't

Other owners ran the same kind of numbers and ended up somewhere else.

Laurel and Tolene George owned the Brass Horn. They took the village's offer and never reopened. Their grandson Steve George told The Progressive in 2018 that starting over had just been too much for them. Marie and Ed Herbst moved the Wonder Bar up the hill, and their son Marty said, "Once we relocated, we had the same crowd." Whether either family signed the petition is anybody's guess.

Becker's tally: four businesses moved away, three owners retired, and another paper took over the newspaper. The geographer Graham Tobin counted eight losses: a restaurant, a grocery, a meat locker where farm families had their meat processed and stored, a laundromat, three bars and the newspaper. He doesn't name the grocery, so either the town had a second grocer or one of the stores that made it up the hill didn't last. He also counted seven gains, among them service businesses and a nursing home that got bigger. Neither man wrote down who'd signed what, so how many of the thirty stayed in business is a number nobody has.

The village library keeps the town's weekly, the Kickapoo Scout, on microfilm, and the reels stop in 1979, the year they broke ground on the new downtown. The one paper in a position to keep track of who moved and who closed goes silent halfway through the story.

Tom Hirsch, the relocation coordinator, gave Time the line the town got remembered by: "This is the little town that could. And it almost didn't." In the same article Mabel Shepard, 79, turned in a shorter review: "It's too far to go for groceries and the mail."

Then there are the people nobody counted at all. The petition counted owners. A renter on the floodplain had nothing to sell, and the published accounts don't say how many tenants lived in the old district or where they went. The buyout was a deal between owners and the government, and tenants weren't party to it.

Knocking on doors, ten years on

In August 1988, ten years after the flood, Tobin ran a door-to-door survey of a random sample of households across Soldiers Grove. He reached 85 adults; three people declined. His results, published in 1992, are about as close as anybody has come to asking the people who lived with the move what they thought of it, and the tables have more in them than the summary.

Nearly 70 percent said the relocation's problems outweighed its advantages. Seventy-five percent said Soldiers Grove was a satisfactory or better place to live. Sixty-six percent said flooding wasn't a problem anymore. Plenty of those answers came from the same people sitting at the same kitchen tables, and I don't see any reason to doubt a one of them.

Asked about community spirit, 31.3 percent remembered it as great or excellent before the move. Afterward, 7.2 percent said so. The share calling it little or none went from 12.5 percent to 34.9. The "before" numbers are ten-year-old memories, and memory has a way of giving the old downtown a fresh coat of paint. But you need more than nostalgia to account for a drop like that.

About 65 percent said their own finances hadn't changed, and in the new part of town nobody said theirs had gotten worse. Tobin concluded all the same that residents had carried part of the cost of rebuilding the town's business life. The bond issue is one plain way that happens. When a village borrows, everybody who pays the village owes, signer or not, floodplain or hill. Spread a debt across every tax bill in town and it may not come to mind when a stranger at the door asks if your household is worse off. People think of it as the village's bill.

Tobin could only ask the people still living there. Nothing says whether the Georges got asked, and the merchants who moved away and the renters who left weren't around to answer. Nobody could have picked the signers out of a crowd anyway, since their names never made it into print. What we know about living in a relocated town comes from the folks who stayed long enough to open the door.

The part of town that didn't move

Forty-seven percent told Tobin that getting around had gotten worse, and it depended a good deal on where you lived. In the new part of town, 30 percent said so. In the older neighborhoods Tobin lumped together as the Flat and the Hill, 63.2 percent did. Those were the people whose grocery and post office had moved farther off, which is Mabel Shepard's complaint again, with a decimal point.

Tobin also warned that parts of town where people lived could still flood. The relocation moved the business district, the village buildings and some homes. Other houses on low ground stayed right where they were, and some of their owners got help to floodproof them, either by raising them up or sealing them against the water.

The river came back to check the work. Wisconsin's hazard mitigation plan records that in 2007 and again in 2008 the business district up the hill came through without a scratch. On the night of June 8, 2008, the village history says, people on Pine Street were taken out by boat and the Flat was evacuated. That was the same low ground that had complained most about the walk to the store in 1988. Under the floods that actually came, the stores stayed dry and some of the houses took water.

Rod Olsen used to run a gas station in the old downtown. In 2018 he told Spectrum News what plenty of his neighbors had felt: "we didn't have a main street and that ticked a lot of people off." He also said the later floods had made him surer he'd done the right thing. He holds both of those at once, same as the town did when Tobin came knocking.

The petition asked for a thorough study of an alternative, and the town got one. What followed was a board resolution, a bond issue, a flood, federal grants, sale prices, and new buildings up the hill, some with their old owners in them and some without. Somewhere in all that are thirty merchants who put their names on a sheet in the mid-seventies. The record keeps how many there were, and not much more.