My interest in history has largely been influenced by my travels over the years. When I was growing up in New Jersey, my aunt moved to Montague, New Jersey. On one of our weekend trips there, she took us on a drive along River Road; which parallels the Delaware River. As we drove along enjoying the fall scenery, I noticed a few Victorian style homes which seemed to be abandoned. I asked about them and that was my introduction to the Tocks Island Dam project. At this time (early ’80s) the dam was a non issue, but the uninhabited homes remained. I filed my curious thoughts away for a later date.
Next, when I moved to Virginia in 1998, one of our weekend excursions was to Shenandoah National Park. I had visited SNP as a teenager on a family camping trip, but now I could go there almost any time. We had lots of visitors from out of town our first few years in Fairfax, and Shenandoah was one of the favorite places to take them. On one of my trips, I picked up a book from the park bookstore about old homesteads still visible along hiking trails. The book explained how mountain families had been forced off their land to create the national park in the ’30s. I felt sad for the families…and filed more curious thoughts away for another day.
This year, as part of my summer vacation, my husband and I decided to take the path less traveled home from our summer home in Maine. We had left our teenage children in the care of their grandparents and had time to ourselves. We left time so we would not have to hurry back to Fairfax. We took a detour through southern Vermont (husband loves the mountains there) and then headed south to New York State. I have a ancestors from the Catskill area and wanted to take my part of the detour through there. Night fell as we were driving along the shores of the Ashokan Reservoir. We had stopped for dinner in a small town, but as we continued we noticed that there were almost no roads or houses near the reservoir. Every so often there would be a signpost for the “former site of…” I decided to look into what this was all about when I got home.
These three examples of places where people have been removed from an area highlight the consequences of eminent domain. I find that the project assigned for this class may be the one time I can combine these three snapshots in history together.
My plan is to examine the effects of eminent domain on the populations which are removed from an area. As a teaching exercise, I’d like students to consider the decisions which have to be made when weighing the advantages for the many (clean drinking water or recreational areas) versus the consequences to the few (those who have to leave the area).
I think that these examples are particularly noteworthy because they involve the dissolution of entire communities – not just a few households or a part of a larger community like a neighborhood. While neighborhoods are significant cultural bodies, in each of the cases I chose a functioning town or towns dissapeared forever. The memories of those towns live on through the decendents of the inhabitants, and thankfully there is information stored in newspaper archives, books and the internet about those communities. If I were trying to show a pattern, I would probably try to support a hypothesis that the use of eminent domain is used in a more judicial and less destructive manner today than in the the first half of the 20th century. In the end, I would like students to consider how they would react if the issue of eminent domain were to touch their lives. I’d like to show that it is possible to fight, but also show how the “government’s” unfettered access to lawyers and money make it hard to succeed in a practical way against a project which has the sheen of “the public good” attached to it.
I’ve got a place to begin, and most of a middle, but my ending is still in progress.
Thanks to all for your support….Michelle