Editor’s Note: This interview first appeared in Path Finders, an email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each week, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Like what you see here? You can join the mailing list at the bottom of this article and receive more conversations like this in your inbox each week.
Last month, I spoke with author and public radio veteran Sid Shroyer to talk about his recent book, When Once Destroyed: A Historical Memoir of the Life and Death of a Small Town, which chronicles the planned flooding and subsequent destruction of his father’s childhood home in rural Somerset, Indiana. Shroyer’s first-person storytelling details the events that unfolded between the 1930s and 1950s to pitch, plan, and execute the Upper Wabash Valley Flood Control Project, a reservoir that displaced a small town in the name of economic development. The story, bookended by Shroyer’s coming of age during the Vietnam War, is intertwined with his own family history and future. These themes continue to be pertinent for rural communities grappling with age-old questions around how progress is defined, how local decisions get made, and what informs identity during times of heightened geopolitical conflict.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Julia Tilton, The Daily Yonder: I want to give you a chance to introduce yourself. Tell me about where you are now. How would you describe your region to people who aren’t familiar with it?
Sid Shroyer: I’m in northern Indiana, South Bend Indiana, which is not where I grew up. I grew up in north central Indiana, about 80 miles south of where I am right now. That is also the location of [my book] When Once Destroyed.
DY: You now have the title of author, but you’ve worn a couple of different hats throughout your career, including that you were on the radio. Tell me a little bit about that.
SS: I grew up at a time when studiously avoiding the word career was part of our personalities. The best thing that I did was become an English teacher. I was a high school English teacher for 27 years. I worked in radio in college. That’s how I met my wife. Afterwards, I moved around and became a high school teacher. I did some part time radio work while I was teaching, and then when I retired 10 years ago, I moved back into more of the radio world, and at a public radio station – our public radio station here, WVPE in Elkhart. It serves South Bend and what’s called the “Michiana” region, which also includes two or three counties in Southern Michigan.
DY: I want to talk about your book. You described what happened to Somerset, Indiana, your hometown, as a mystery, and the impetus to write this book was to figure out what happened. As you dug into the history, were there any parts of the process that were unexpected?
SS: Yeah, very definitely unexpected. I started out to write a letter to my grandson because he was given my father’s name, and I thought I ought to tell him something about Dad. And so I began to dig into the stories about Dad and the town that he grew up in.
As I got into it a little bit, I realized, well, I’m going to have to talk about the fact that my dad’s town was destroyed, and I don’t really know what happened. There was a lot that I uncovered that I was surprised that other people hadn’t already uncovered. The role of the press surprised me. Constituents were put off and ignored during a secret process between 1945 and 1954, and by the time people found out what was going on, it was really too late to stop it. I learned stories from my brother and my sister about Dad and his life and our life growing up that I didn’t know, in addition to the hidden story of the Upper Wabash Valley Flood Control project.
I didn’t really start out with an intention other than to tell my grandson about my dad. I didn’t start with an intention that then created the story. I started with a story that seemed to create the intention.
DY: To me, that framing – the letter to your grandson – was striking. You structured the narrative in a way that’s both looking backwards, telling this story about what happened to Somerset and your father and even your grandparents, but then it’s also looking forward, and you’re anticipating your young grandson realizing that his family history is intertwined with this place. At the end of the book you call it “completing the cosmic circle.” I wanted to hear more about that decision, and about you, at the center of these generations. What was that experience like for you?
SS: It awakened me to why I am the way I am. The story of what happened to my dad’s hometown and the loss of the family farm as a sort of a common thread experience for a lot of people, and the impact that had on my father. He had to leave the farm and go to work into a place where he didn’t really want to be. The ongoing effect of that, the impact of that on me and how I’m connected to that – these are things that I picked up along the way in telling the story of Dad and his community.
I recognized pretty early on that there was a story here that I needed to tell, and that it was not only a narrow story about my family’s life and that little town of 250 people, but it was a common story, and a common story that relates to a lot of rural communities. I think it relates to a lot of urban communities too, the absence and destruction of neighborhoods, and what that does to people.
DY: To me, your book is this story about how people in power, like government officials, can decide on a course of action for the community without local input, in the name of progress, or economic development. Your reporting reveals that in the case of Somerset, those in power did some truly shady things in their endeavors to produce their desired result, and then they tried to destroy the evidence. This story is one that goes back generations, but it feels familiar. Do you think the story’s themes are relevant to rural places today?
SS: When I was writing and researching, there were a lot of what you might call coincidences in what I was discovering. One of those coincidences was the fact that I have breakfast once a month with a group of retired New Prairie High School teachers. New Prairie High School, where I taught, is a consolidated district that includes the town of New Carlisle, which is a town among many in this part of the world that’s being threatened by data centers.
In discussing my book with my friends at breakfast and also discussing what was happening in town about a data center that wanted to move in nearby, there were some similarities. There’s powerful people that are threatening the social life and environmental life of people in town. I actually felt the need to speak at a rezoning hearing that the county council had about what I perceived to be the injustice happening because of people who didn’t live in the community making decisions for the community that would affect the present town and future generations and threaten the way of life.
That’s what the book is about, a way of life being destroyed. That’s what the destruction of family farms is about, the destruction of a way of life. It’s kind of hard for me now not to see it pretty much everywhere I look.
DY: I’m glad that you brought up the data center piece of this. In my own reporting, I’ve been following the development of data centers in rural communities all over the country. Across a broad geography, there’s a couple of common threads that I’ve picked up on. One is that there is often a tension between what residents, you know, locals, want and envision for their community, and what developers and and in turn, local officials want and envision. Then there’s also the secrecy aspect. It seems to boil down to a question of local control. And what I’ve observed in my reporting is that maintaining local control can be a real struggle in the face of large corporations and developers and outside influences from both state and federal policymaking. I wanted to bring that into this conversation, because there’s generations of difference between the story that you wrote and the story that’s playing out now, but it seems like there are quite a few similarities.
SS: One of the things that strikes me about the story – in the difference between Somerset and New Carlisle – was the accessibility of social media, and specifically Facebook. So a town of a couple thousand people or 2,500 people, has a community Facebook page, and a community forum, and people were able to communicate about what’s happening in a way that most certainly the people of Somerset did not have. They were very isolated. We have a tendency to think of social media as a reactionary force, but I think there’s a lot of progressive movement in the country right now that we’re seeing being assisted by access to information, social media, and people’s ability to communicate.
DY: In the story of Somerset, there wasn’t a lot of press coverage about the flood control project, and the press coverage that did exist was very limited. Today, we live in a completely different media ecosystem. I wondered if that was something that you grappled with when digging into this story. If the flood control project had happened today, do you think the outcome would be the same, or do you think it would be different, given our access to information?
SS: I think there are a lot of reasons why this wouldn’t happen today, and I think social media is part of that. There’s a different attitude toward the government now than there was when this was going on. The major thing that I remember that was going on in the world at the time I was growing up was the Vietnam War. The Vietnam War was a little bit later than the flood control project, but I think some of the same aspects of the environment were at play. It’s harder for people to hide things now than it was then. People are not as compliant now. There’s a tradition, I think, in rural communities of compliance, of going along. One of the best sources in the book was the grandson of my great aunt, who I’d never met before I started this project. He told me that something like the flood control project could not happen now, because people would have immediately challenged what was going on.
But I guess it is happening in other ways, right? It’s data centers and different wars. And, you know, as it relates to social media, I think we can see this in a broader way as it relates to events that aren’t filtered. I think specifically of Gaza and the fact that people, especially young people, had access to video and information that probably would not have been made available 20 or 25 years ago. We see this in the war that’s going on now. We don’t necessarily have to rely on the New York Times to tell us the truth, to tell us what’s really happening in the world. Sometimes what they tell us and what we’re seeing with our own eyes don’t necessarily mesh. So I think social media is having a big impact on the culture.
DY: This isn’t a spoiler, but at the end of the book, there’s this scene where you go into what it was like coming of age during the Vietnam War. At one moment, you realize, in the heat of the controversy and public discourse over the war, that “it’s our flag too,” meaning that even those like yourself, who opposed the war, have a claim to the American flag. I thought that was such a poignant part of the book. That both sides can claim the American flag.
I finished the book, and I was sort of like, oh my goodness. What you describe from that time, and the public reaction to the war, feels salient right now, in the midst of the US-Iran war. With that in mind, are there lessons that you learned from that time that apply to our current moment?
SS: I had a similar experience connected to the recent winter Olympics. I’m not sure I can root for the guys who represent a country that invaded Minnesota. My grandson lives in Minnesota. I find myself getting angry in a way that I recall Kent State [when members of the Ohio National Guard shot at unarmed college students protesting the war in Vietnam, killing four]. In the book, I talk about the wisdom of my father, and, to try to make a connection to now, it’s not necessarily the people at the head of the government, but the athletes and the values that I understand as American. It’s trying to hang on to those values and still believe in some sense of American, not exceptionalism, but American democracy, and the melting pot.
It can be frustrating now, to feel like that’s being taken away from us, those things that we relied on. And, you know, it’s our flag too. That was my father’s bit. He didn’t have to say a whole lot, but, man, that was pretty powerful for a 16-year-old kid to hear, you know, and it never left me.
I think in some ways, this book and the reason I wanted to tell my grandson about my dad was that statement alone. You can’t let other people define you. Hold on to those beliefs. There’s something to be said for that.
DY: Thanks, Sid. Find more information about Shroyer’s book, When Once Destroyed: A Historical Memoir of the Life and Death of a Small Town, at his websiteor on his Substack.
This interview first appeared in Path Finders, a weekly email newsletter from the Daily Yonder. Each Monday, Path Finders features a Q&A with a rural thinker, creator, or doer. Join the mailing list today, to have these illuminating conversations delivered straight to your inbox.
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The post Q&A: Author Sid Shroyer on Destruction in the Name of “Economic Development” appeared first on The Daily Yonder.
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