Letter: Sounds harmless, right?
JASPER, Ind. (July 23, 2024) – The Indiana Department of Transportation (INDOT) has given the Mid-States Corridor Project Team notice to proceed with the first Tier 2 Study. Work will begin in the Dubois County area to determine the alignment and access plan for the new highway. The Tier 2 Study will evaluate more site-specific impacts to determine the specific preferred location and right-of-way needs of a 200-to-500-foot-wide facility.
Sounds harmless, right?
Their “PREFERRED LOCATION” would devastate our farm. A 500-foot right-of-way doesn’t seem bad until you find out it would be a 500 foot by nearly a quarter of a mile through the heart our 450-acre farm, cutting farm lanes and fields in half diagonally, greatly reducing acreage, access for planting and harvesting the long fertile crop fields and halving the income that currently pays bills and taxes and supplements four family members’ retirement funds.
Doesn’t seem bad until you notice it would bulldoze every building on the homestead, including the home we built 50 years ago, that we custom-designed for the future with only 1 step to enter and handicapped bathrooms, using native oak from our woods for floor joists, and the summer we spent doing the grunge work of handling blocks and bricks, hanging insulation and plasterboard, cleaning and painting, allowing the carpenters to efficiently and quickly do the construction.
Doesn’t seem bad until you notice three historical 100-year-old plus buildings of hand-hewn timbers from our woods would be reduced to dust, the heirloom trees of pears, pecans, persimmons, hickory and black walnuts in the barn yards that would be ruthlessly cut down, even Great Aunt Lena’s daffodils that bloom where her front gate stood, after a century would be no more.
Doesn’t seem bad until Grandma’s 100-year-old Concord grape vine, her daylilies, and the descendants of the tart pie cherry trees I helped Great Aunt Lydia pick as a child suddenly disappear from our yard.
Doesn’t seem bad until you know the countless hours of hard labor with teams of mules and draft horses it took my great grandfather, great uncle and his father, their families and friends to drain swampy ground (A requirement by the State of Indiana on the original deed, that also declares it would belong to the family and their heirs forever.), to clear brush and scrub, to make it into a productive farm. My Grandpa worked nearly every day from the time he got home from World War One until his eighties on the farm, my dad until his health declined in his seventies.
Doesn’t seem bad until you lose the lake built in the sixties to control the water washing through a gulley, that you fished and swam in, that geese stop to rest and to nest on, that allowed you to have a constant water supply for your livestock. Three smaller ponds and the wildlife habitats around them would also be history. Other erosion and water control projects put in with help of the County Soil and Water Conservation District would be rendered practically nonexistent.
Doesn’t seem bad until the beautiful woods where we hunted for mushrooms, blackberries, nuts and squirrels, spent numerous hours exploring and riding horses, observed raccoons, deer, turtles, rabbits, skunks, coyotes, even bobcats thriving, where you watch the antics of wild turkeys, with hawks and owls circling in the sky, listen to a wide variety of song birds, and where trees were selectively harvested for lumber and firewood, are only part of your memory.
Doesn’t seem bad until you stand, at the pavilion at the State Fair before the 105 other farm families also honored, with your entire family receiving a Hoosier Homestead award for keeping and farming the land through the generations since it was purchased by our Great-grandfather 112 years ago, other sections by our great-great uncle in 1851 and 1853.
Doesn’t seem bad until you know all your neighbors are having similar nightmares.
Stop the Mid-States Corridor project. Please!
Terri Bartelt
Huntingburg
