|
|
| Chaseburg forever changed |
By: Ann Morrison
|
|
GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN...
|
|
|
AS YOU DRIVE south down Main Street in Lower Chaseburg, Wisconsin, you can’t help but notice the homes and businesses have that sagging, post-flood, deserted, look. After working for the Army Corps of Engineers in New Orleans’ 9th Ward after Hurricane Katrina, it is a look that has become familiar to me.
The houses in Chaseburg, which were badly flooded in August 2007 and then once again in June of this year, seem to sag into their foundations, with flood mud and mold that creeps up the sides of what was once clean paint. Travel a couple of blocks into town and you’ll hit the corner of Main and Mill Streets, once the epicenter of Chaseburg, where you’ll see a naked and blind looking house that sticks out in the picture. Both its siding and windows have been removed.
The naked house is in the first stages of deconstruction. The siding and windows are being recycled prior to the transportation of the entire structure to a new location, where it will be stripped down to the frame and rebuilt. The Village of Chaseburg, which has been waiting for more than 15 months, has finally received the go-ahead from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to begin demolition and reconstruction projects.
The village itself lies deep in the heart of the valley between Coon Valley and Stoddard. Chaseburg has the unique physical characteristic of being situated on two steps with a steep rise in elevation between its lower plane and flat upper plateau.
Reflecting its unique land formations, the two areas are referred to as Upper Chaseburg and Lower Chaseburg. The split-level village’s two parts are right next to each other, within a couple of hundred feet up the hill.
The original plat of the town was in Lower Chaseburg. The village was founded by Henry Chase, who came from Vermont in 1862 and built a sawmill on Coon Creek, in Hamburg Township. Later, a farm on top of the hill was incorporated into the village. In 1904, the railroad was laid through the town and the company plotted out what is now Upper Chaseburg. The street in front of the Tippy Toe Inn is on what is known as Depot Street.
Small villages have been on a downward trend ever since the advent of the automobile, but it wasn’t until the 1970s, when the two-car family became a general phenomenon, that small towns really took a major hit. Even as late as the 1960s, Chaseburg had two grocery stores, a barbershop, several gas stations, three bars, and two car dealerships. This was when trips to La Crosse were considered an event and not a daily occurrence. The village was the community, and the townsfolk rarely strayed out of it.
Living in Chaseburg has meant living with Coon Creek and its intemperate ways. The creek has loomed mightily in the village history as it flooded, off and on, in the downtown district, since the town’s inception. A big flood in 1957 covered the street in the Lower Town and rose so high it was waist deep on the ground floors in several business places. Most of those businesses have long since disappeared. What was left, the more recent floods of August 2007 and June 2008 destroyed.
The locals say flooding has gotten worse over the years, and they blame it on the filling in of the creek and the amount of debris in it. This they don’t feel is as inevitable as the automobile-oriented demographic shifts.
Some of the old-timers gather regularly for coffee at the Tippy Toe. Recently, they spoke about what they think has gone wrong.
“Ever since they built the dam on the river (Lock and Dam #8 in Genoa),” says Wayne Peters, a regular at coffee, “the creek has slowed down. It cuts down the flow of the water. I’ve been here 49 years,” he added, “and there used to be a bar down in the creek, and on that you can see it has filled up a least six feet since then. There’s only about two feet between the bridge and the ground now.”
“But when we were kids swimming we could swim by both bridges,” added David Johnson, another coffee regular. “You could walk underneath—now you couldn’t even crawl. We used to jump off of it. There must have been over ten feet of water.”
“The filling in first started with the dam,” agreed Art Berg, another member of the group. “In 1964, they dredged the creek. That would help a lot if they did that again.”
Linda DeGarmo, owner of the Tippy Toe and Chaseburg’s village clerk, echoed the elders’ sentiments.
“The creek is full of debris,” she said. “Nobody is pasturing cattle anymore so the water is going outwards to form wetlands—which slows the movement down. Between here and Stoddard, that all used to be pastureland and it was down low, but now it is all cattail and that purple loosestrife stuff, so it slows the water down. People used to clean the creeks out and they won’t allow you to do that anymore, so there is debris in the creek. That we know for a fact.”
Even though the 2007 flood was more than 15 months ago, the bureaucratic miasma was so thick, the town has just now navigated through the maze to the point where they can start taking action. The village had to work through what are known as buyouts for all of the affected properties. To obtain money for the buyouts, they first had to get grants from FEMA, the Department of Natural Resources, and the Department of Commerce. The residents have felt their patience stretch to the breaking point as they endured holdup after holdup. In the meantime, Chaseburg suffered another flood. The money from the first flood didn’t actually come through until more than a year after the original event.
Once the federal part had been settled, the village proceeded by hiring an appraiser to assign a pre-flood monetary value to the now-damaged properties. Next, the Hazard Mitigation team came in to review the appraisals. After those two procedures were done, the homeowners were sought out for approval to enable the village to purchase their properties. When the homeowners get ready to buy something new, they receive their money.
Then the village puts out bids for demolition. At present, five buildings have been awarded bids. The removal of the siding and windows on the corner building of Main and Mill streets constitutes the first physical step in the process.
Over the coming months, 16 structures will come down. This encompasses the majority of Lower Chaseburg—the area where the town was founded and formerly the main business district. Only two of the recently flooded businesses will be relocating in Upper Chaseburg, and as far as the relocation of the lost homes, that remains to be seen. Some of the village’s population will be gone for good. Only the Hideaway Bar and Restaurant (which stands on slightly higher ground) will remain, eventually to be surrounded by a park and walking trail. It will look pretty idyllic, but Chaseburg, as a community, Upper and Lower, will never be quite the same.
Ann Morrison works as a long-term crisis counselor for Lutheran Social Services and has a landscaping business, Designscapes.
|
|
Printer-friendly format
|
|
|
|
