Aug. 1 will mark a decade since the levee along Fountain Creek failed, submerging much of Valmeyer in the muddy floodwaters of the Mississippi River and triggering a series of events leading to the town's decampment for higher ground.

But visitors to the new Valmeyer, which sits atop a bluff called Salt Lick Point some 30 miles south of St. Louis, will find few clues that anything of note ever happened there. There are no 10th anniversary banners dangling from lampposts, no fliers announcing commemorative prayer services.

The reason, said Village Administrator Dennis Knobloch, is that the flood tore a deep wound through Valmeyer that hasn't completely healed. Many of the 500 or so residents who made the move prefer not to talk about the flood, and have grown weary of the reporters who have flocked to town to ask them about it.

And so village leaders have decided to let the anniversary pass without formal acknowledgment.

"Our citizens worked very hard on this relocation project and should feel proud of what we accomplished," said Knobloch, who was mayor at the time of the flood. "At the same time, we had to heal emotionally from what happened, and every time it's brought up again it kind of festers. We decided, let's just forget it and move on."

The reconstituted Valmeyer, which sits a mile and a half east of the original village on Illinois Route 156, doesn't resemble a town so much as an unusually large subdivision. New homes with vinyl siding are arranged along tidy streets and around prim cul-de-sacs. There is a bank, a tavern, a post office and a carwash, although a street - Knobloch Boulevard - that village leaders set aside for a new commercial center still is mostly empty.

Still, new houses are being built on nearly every street, and new residents are moving in at a steady clip. Valmeyer's population is about 600, Knobloch said, or about two-thirds of its population a decade ago.




Looking at it now, it's tempting to conclude that the move was a relatively simple affair. But Knobloch and the residents who lived through it say it was a logistically complex and emotionally wrenching ordeal from which Valmeyer is still recovering. The estimated total cost was $22 million. Residents scoff at what they say is a popular misconception, that the new town was handed to them through generous government buyouts.

"I think most people are going to be reeling financially for some time yet," Knobloch said. "Most of the people took a step back financially because of the flood. The residents were paid pre-flood market value for their properties that in most cases did not equal the replacement cost of the houses that they built in the new town."

Many residents had to increase their mortgages or take out new ones, including older residents who had paid off their houses years or decades before. Valmeyer lost a third of its residential tax base, forcing it to raise taxes on those who remained. The move, including the $3 million it cost to buy and annex 500 acres of farmland, put the village millions of dollars in debt.

The decision to move the town started out as little more than an idea, one that many residents initially dismissed as fantasy, recalled Rick Brewer, 39, a village police officer at the time of the flood.

"I'll never forget giving (Knobloch) a ride - I'm going to say this was within three weeks of the flood," said Brewer, who lost the two-story house that he and his wife, Michelle, had shared since 1991. "And he said, 'You know, I wonder what it would take to move this town up the bluffs?' I remember asking him, 'Dennis, do you think this is reality, or are we trying to settle everybody's mind right now?' And he's like, 'I think it can be done.'"

It was a hard sell. Many residents chose instead to move to nearby Waterloo or Columbia, where they could build new houses in relatively short order. Those who agreed to move with the town, meanwhile, were condemning themselves to as many as three years in "FEMAville," the makeshift neighborhood of trailers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency had constructed on a graveled half-acre near Waterloo.

"You're basically asking people to put their lives on hold until all of this could be accomplished," said Michelle Brewer, who toughed it out in FEMAville with her husband. "Even when they could get the ground, you had the utilities to worry about. There were so many things that never even entered your mind."

"There was no future
down below"




Knobloch credits the village's three churches with helping to keep the community whole. Father Edwin Hustedde, who arrived at St. Mary's Catholic Church just two days before the flood, said his congregation met at a Catholic church in nearby Madonnaville, then at Gibault Catholic High School in Waterloo and finally in one of the trailers on the Monroe County Fairgrounds that served for a time as Valmeyer's high school. The new $800,000 church opened in 1995.

In the end, Hustedde said, the church and the town had no choice but to move. The original town's location in the flood plain had all but put a halt to new construction there even before the flood.

"There was no future down below," Hustedde said.

About two dozen residents whose homes were not severely damaged in the flood decided to stay behind in the original town, Knobloch said. Most of these houses are concentrated at the eastern end of the original town, near the foot of the bluffs.

Today, the old town center is eerily quiet, like a ghost town. Fields of grass have replaced the hundreds of homes that the floodwaters destroyed. Crumbling sidewalks and vacant lots line the stretch of Route 156 that once served as the village's commercial center.

Residents say that a sense of community is beginning to return to Valmeyer. Michelle Brewer, who lost her old house when the floodwaters rose to the second-story floor joists, said she and her husband never seriously considered moving anywhere else.

"This was where I wanted to raise my kids," she said.

Reporter William Lamb:
E-mail: wlamb@post-dispatch.com
Phone: 618-235-6142