A Town Makes History by Rising to New Heights

More than a month had passed since the couple loaded their children into the car and fled the coming deluge. A couple of days after the Glaenzers abandoned their place, the Mississippi rolled in, surging through downtown, pouring over porches, in some cases rising to rooftops. When the water rolled back, it left rotting walls and a moldy stench of raw sewage and fish. "We still thought, with the flood insurance, we could fix up that house and start again," Darrell recalls. "Then the town board passed out this paper with questions on it. I thought it was ludicrous at the time. Moving the entire town was the furthest thing from my mind."

Valmeyer (pop. 900), 30 miles south of St. Louis, was one of the many towns drowned by the Mississippi in the summer of 1993. After the floods, the costliest in American history, some towns cleaned up, others split up. But Valmeyer has been making history by moving up. Taking advantage of a recent federal program in "hazard mitigation," a new Valmeyer has risen out of a 500-acre cornfield and woodland on a bluff just above the ruins of the old town. Citizens gathered the will and wherewithal to build a whole new town from scratch: hundreds of houses, a downtown, churches, a school, a fire station and a post office. The new Valmeyer won't be quite finished until late this year. But after two cramped winters in a trailer city provided by FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Administration), all but a few residents have moved in, staking their claims on porches fronting freshly seeded lawns.

Before the deluge, Valmeyer wasn't much different from any other small farmland town beside a two-lane blacktop. "It was the kind of town," handyman Mike Mueller says, "where you can be 40 years old but everyone still sees you as your dad's son." Says Anna Glaenzer, "Our son would say 'Mom, I want to go to a friend's,' and I'd say, 'Be home by dark,' and I didn't worry. That meant a lot."

Flood years--1910, '43, '44, '47-- were part of the town's lore, and residents shared the fatalism commonly found in harm's way. Many trusted the federal levee system, which had kept Valmeyer dry since the last flood. Darrell Glaenzer trusted his father. "My dad told me a long time ago there'd be another flood," Darrell says.

"He said he might not live to see it, but if that levee broke we'd have water up to the ceiling. He died on July 9. Heart attack. That was the day after we began sandbagging."

For three weeks the TV news told townspeople that levees were being breached upriver, but Valmeyer stayed put. "You felt as soon as you moved out, you'd be giving up," Darrell recalls. "If you gave up, it would happen." On July 16, a week after doubling their flood insurance to $20,000, the Glaenzers moved baby books, jewelry and their marriage license into their car but went on sleeping in their house. On July 31, everyone was ordered out; the river was on its way.

The main channel of the Mississippi usually stays a good four miles from the town's old site. This time the flood put Valmeyer under as much as 20 feet of water, a brown lake that stretched for miles. The water hung on in many places for two months. Then, in early September, as residents were digging out, it started to rain again. The river poured through the broken levee and flooded the place a second time. The first flood broke some hearts; the second broke spirits.

Suddenly crammed into emergency trailers, families put their belongings in storage and their lives in limbo. "There we were living the quote unquote American dream," Glaenzer says. "Both working, paying the mortgage, two kids in school. And like that, we're homeless. We'd wake up in the middle of the night and wonder, What's going to happen to us?" In their first few weeks adrift, the Glaenzers returned to Valmeyer several times, remembering and grieving. "We'd go home and just sit on the porch," Anna Glaenzer recalls. "We always found something left behind, a toy or some junk to take back to the trailer. We couldn't just leave it lying there." It was not until the first town meeting in Columbia that the Glaenzers heard the term "hazard mitigation," bureaucratese for "keeping the hell out of nature's way."

Time was when FEMA would simply have paid to rebuild Valmeyer in the floodplain. But in 1988 the government at last got tired of throwing away taxpayers' money that way. It made plans to move people out of the path of "recurring natural disasters." Valmeyer, with 90 percent of its buildings ravaged, easily qualified for the new program. At the town meeting, residents learned the future according to FEMA. Anyone was welcome to rebuild in the old town, provided he used his own money and ran his own risks. But under the new laws, the town wouldn't receive a dime of government funds to rise again in the river's path--unless it chose to "elevate" all new structures above the latest flood level. Angry, confused, still numb from the nightmare, residents were asked whether they wanted to build a new Valmeyer and call it home.

The meeting lasted more than three hours. It took a second meeting the next night to handle everybody. Skeptics surfaced first, warning of endless bureaucracy and a "town" that would be, at best, little more than a subdivision. They'd never be able to build a whole town. Then a dash of pioneer spirit took hold. "Before they came up with the idea of moving, my mind was blank, my heart was just empty," says Jim Harget, a member of Valmeyer's town board. "I wanted to rebuild on our old site, but my wife said, 'Can you promise me a flood will never happen again?' I didn't know what to do." Pressed to decide, two-thirds of Valmeyer backed relocation. Still doubtful, the Glaenzers voted for it, too.

Town officials promised to get moving. Then the Glaenzers went "home" to the trailer city that everyone called "FEMAville" to debate the matter all over again.

"Maybe we could borrow the money to rebuild," Anna suggested. "Sure, if we want to kiss the kids' college goodbye," Darrell responded. "We only got 15 grand in equity down there. So we borrow 30 grand and rebuild. Then maybe get flooded again? My dad had it right."

They looked at real estate in neighboring towns, but with 50,000 houses flooded, some places once worth $75,000 were going for as much as $90,000. Even apartments were scarce, with rents rising like floodwaters. A new Valmeyer began to seem like their only chance for a home.

And bit by bit, townspeople learned how exacting a task they had taken on. This was not only a first for them. It was an enormous challenge for FEMA. The agency had helped to relocate other towns, but nothing on the scale of Valmeyer. Finance and construction involved 22 government agencies; costs were in the range of $28 million. Residents had to be warned that the project might take seven years. If it took that long, the Glaenzers figured, daughter Cari would have finished college and 8-year-old son Josh would be in high school. Many residents did buy homes nearby, but 200 families hung on to the idea that a new Valmeyer was worth waiting and working for.

Town leaders convinced a retired farmer to sell them a cornfield on the bluffs just above their wreckage. By December of that first fall, billboards on the empty cornfield announced "Valmeyer IL.--a New Beginning." Renting a soda machine and some outhouses, the town opened its new Village Hall, a trailer just a dusty drive off Route 156 in the afternoon shadow of a water tower. Each week as winter winds rattled the Village Hall, seven committees of town residents met to plan a town. It proved a little like playing God, but without the hubris. Farmers found themselves plowing through state and federal building codes. Bank tellers and businessmen mastered blueprints. Secretaries and school teachers decided details from sewers to streetlamps.

"Ordinances," recalls Jean Langsdorf, who chaired the town design, parks and commons committee. "We had to read through subdivision ordinances, sign control ordinances, soil erosion ordinances..." Forced to become urban planners, committee members had to get familiar with infrastructure they'd taken for granted. "Who pays attention to streetlights?" Langsdorf asks. "Suddenly we were all making suggestions on lights, pavement, curb design, you name it. I'd get home after a meeting and wonder, What did we just do? Was it right? What am I doing heading a design committee? I'm an accountant!"

On high school gridirons where the Valmeyer Pirates play their archrivals, the Waterloo Bulldogs, Valmeyer was long belittled as a refuge for "river rats." It was a town in "the bottom," a place of high principles--work and family--but low rents and rough edges. Now, while other flooded towns--Grafton, Illinois, and Rhineland and Pattonsburg, Missouri--were planning relocations through FEMA, the "river rats" began to feel proud about going whole hog for a new life. Valmeyer would rise again, no longer a town at the end of the road, but a community of 1,400 sporting the keyhole cul-de-sacs and golf course lawns of a modern suburb.

"What makes a town, anyway?" Jim Harget asks. "It's not just buildings. It's people. If we just sat around and bickered we wouldn't have gotten anywhere."

On a blustery, subzero day in December, three months after voting to relocate, Valmeyer's families gathered in the cornfield where they hoped they would live someday. Streets had been mapped out by then. They used a lottery to determine the order in which residents picked individual house lots. Huddled together in tractor-drawn haywagons, the new pioneers learned that rebuilding might not take seven years. With luck and good weather, the story went, people might begin moving in by next Christmas. The only thing they really needed was houses, and some 25 local contractors stood ready to work. Each family, using insurance settlements, FEMA's buyout money and savings, had to plan for itself. So that winter, nearly an entire town went shopping.

"Every time you'd go to Wal-Mart, you'd see someone you knew," remembers Valmeyer policeman Rick Brewer. "People were pushing carts piled with light fixtures, ceiling fans, carpet samples. If anyone got a deal on faucets, they'd tell everyone else. We were all in this together."

"Choosing street names took longer than anything else to decide," Langsdorf recalls. "People get funny bout such things. Did we want to bring up the same names from down below? Did we want to honor anybody?" The names chosen reflected a small town's talent for compromise. Empson Street was named for a doctor who delivered almost every baby in town. Other streets edged toward a new suburban flavor--Oak Court, Fox Pointe, Woodland Ridge. Then downtown, where a new Main Street might have been, there was Knobloch Boulevard.

As a street name, "Knobloch" (the K is not silent) may lack the panache of "Fox Pointe." But from the bottom to the bluffs, residents agree that without the street's namesake, Valmeyer would still be stuck in the mud. Since the flood, Mayor Dennis Knobloch was the quiet force holding Valmeyer together. A stoic, unflappable Midwesterner known around town as a skilled artist and businessman, he had advanced from teller to CEO of the Farmers State Bank on Main Street. In 1989 he easily won the $70-per-month job as the mayor; he was a few months into his second term when the flood hit. In the town's final hours, he was on the levee, sounding the emergency siren to make sure everyone had left, then giving the go-ahead to turn off the electricity. The clock on Valmeyer's old Village Hall stopped at 1:22 A.M. on August 2. As the waters rose, Knobloch stood with others in the cemetery on a small rise below the bluffs, close enough to hear the water rushing in.

"People were crying and hugging," Knobloch recalls. "We had worked around the clock for three weeks to prevent this, then had it go right through our fingers."

Following the flood, while his wife, Elaine, and their three children tended the family's antique store in nearby Maeystown, Knobloch took up residence in his 1988 Chevy pickup, parked at the edge of Valmeyer. With a cellular phone and no shortage of grit, he began weaving the consensus to make a town grow from a bushel of promises. "I've never seen anyone work as hard to help a community," says FEMA director James Lee Witt.

A year after the decision to relocate, Knobloch drove me in his pickup through an empty field, seeing a town where others saw only dirt and sky. Pointing to a stretch of clods and cornhusks, he said, "This is the light industrial area. The school is over there." In the new Valmeyer, that kind of foresight was important enough to have its own local acronym, VISIONS--Valmeyer Integrating Sustainably Into Our New Setting. But even the most acute vision can't see the problems laying fallow in an open field, especially in this day of environmental impact reports and lingering litigation.

That farmer's cornfield had two owners, and when one died six months after the contracts were signed, the title got tangled in probate. After the town actually got possession, federal law required a survey for relics. A team of archaeologists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign finally salvaged a prehistoric campsite and a village. By then nearly a year had passed since the flood. At Valmeyer's annual Fourth of July picnic two years ago, hundreds of residents gathered in the ruined town for softball, a parade past empty buildings on Main Street, and fireworks spelling out "Valmeyer--A New Beginning." On the bluff above not much had been done.

Suddenly, it turned out that an adjacent quarry owned mineral rights under their new land. Before graded streets could be paved, townsfolk found they needed $3.2 million to settle that claim. Knobloch and committees began piecing together loans and bonds while everybody girded themselves to spend a second winter in trailers. "When we fist moved into that trailer, it seemed so big," Darrell Glaenzer says. "Six months later, we had stuff piled all over. We couldn't stand to stay in it. When we were out, we kept looking for excuses not to go back."

Though the town was on hold, time and mortgages waited for nobody. As adjacent cornfields were cut and laid low for fall, FEMA officials called Valmeyer families one by one to the village trailer. Beneath a photograph of the told town up to its eaves in water, residents signed papers paying off their past, mortgaging their future. Under "hazard mitigation" guidelines, FEMA paid residents the difference between the market value of their old homes and their insurance. The Glaenzers' place was valued at $40,000. They collected $20,000 in insurance; FEMA paid them the other $20,000. But their old house was a shambles, and all but worthless now, though the Glaenzers had to pay off the full mortgage. This left them with $25,000--barely enough for a down payment on a new house.

Shortly after closing the mortgage deal, Anna Glaenzer had to sign a check in a local store to buy some jeans. The clerk noticed her Valmeyer address. "How nice of the government to buy you all new homes," she sniped. "Excuse me!" Anna shot back. "We're making payments on that new home!" Darrell gently led his wife from the store before she could explain how the Mississippi had washed away not only their house but their savings. Before the flood, they were only 10 years from owning their home. Now they were starting over with a 30-year mortgage. They got a low-interest loan arranged for flood victims, but new homes don't sell for $40,000. Their new payments are nearly double the installments they paid before. "And I was perfectly happy where I was," Anna moaned. "I'd go home in a heartbeat."

But a home, old or new, was a place Valmeyer couldn't seem to find that fall. In December, as they had for decades, they lit the town's star on the bluffs. In FEMAville, Christmas came and went again. Not a single new house had been finished. Rumors of lawsuits and bureaucratic boondoggles made some wish they'd taken the money and run. Anna's brother, tired of waiting, sold his new Valmeyer lot before the house was built.

But late in 1994, with no guarantee that Valmeyer would ever be finished, Gordon Anderson bought a trailer and had it installed on his lot within walking distance of Village Hall. All winter, Anderson filled the trailer with furnishings. In April of last year, wading through mud carrying their 6-month-old son, Anderson and his wife, Joan, moved into the new Valmeyer, one of the first families to do so. Within days, the couple planted a dozen trees, tomatoes, and a mailbox out front. Other families soon joined them. "It was kind of fun, like camping out," Anderson remembers. By June 1995, Valmeyer was really changing from blueprint to boomtown.

All through summer, streets were paved a block at a time. Underground utilities went in, homes went up, and moving vans appeared on Fox Pointe and Oak Drive. By last fall, Valmeyer bloomed with the crocuses of suburban life--swingsets, barbecues and bird feeders. The school went up. In hollow shells of churches, volunteer crews from dioceses in other states helped parishioners hammer nails and put up drywall. And on October 1, just two years and two months after they packed their lives in boxes, the Glaenzer family finally went home.

"Would you like to come in?" Anna asked me, standing in front of her dusty driveway. "Look, we actually have a lace where people can come in and sit." She stepped around unpacked boxes, pointed out the site of a future patio, and beamed. "The day we moved in, I just lay on the sofa and said, 'I'm not getting up again. Please don't move me.'"

The new town looks nothing like the old, of course. Residents are taller than their new trees, and neither cul-de-sacs nor custom homes doth a hometown make. Many still fight tears when recalling the flood. But sitting on his front porch, Jim Harget explains how residents are turning a collection of houses into neighborhoods. "Simple," Harget says. "We're being neighborly." Every evening when the Glaenzers stroll down North Meyer Avenue, a new neighbor calls them in to show off the new house.

Meanwhile, most of Valmeyer in the bottom got torn down as bulldozers razed condemned building. Weeks before, its old residents made one last effort to salvage their past. Roaming the ruins, Valmeyer's Social Services Committee removed banisters and ornate trim from old houses and town buildings. These, along with photographs, news clippings, restaurant menus, will be featured in the town's museum, installed in an old log cabin that had been a home on the cornfield. Where a town of 900 once was, only a handful of houses, still stand, restored by stubborn owners despite flood danger. The rest, clogged by weeds, flat as an ocean floor, is again what the river made it--a floodplain. "People say we've gotten new houses and everything will be wonderful," says resident Marietta Schneider. "But no matter what happens, the flood has taken something we'll never get back."

Every fall from now on, though, Darrell and Anna Glaenzer will have a rare view from their patio, built with bricks hauled up from his mother's old house. When cold weather strips the trees, they will gaze down on Valmeyer Road winding through the floodplain toward the old town. Then, turning around, they'll see new homes, the tops of new churches and the steady stream of neighbors being neighborly. Says Anna: "It still feels like we're living in somebody else's house, but give it a few years and maybe it'll seem like we've been here forever."

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