Excerpt: When Once Destroyed

Local history creative non-fiction memoir When Once Destroyed (spring 2025) is written as a letter to my grandson, who like my father is named “Vern.” This excerpt comes from two chapters. 

In May 1955, after years of mysterious work and rumors, the Army Corps of Engineers let it slip that a massive three-pronged reservoir project in north central Indiana would mean the destruction of a town called Somerset in Wabash County. An “interim report” on the plan had been delayed several months. 

Seventy-Five Feet Above The Stream Bed 

Early in 1955, three-and-a-half months before the big Somerset-is-toast reveal, Congressman Beamer got a letter from a Huntington County farmer named Rolland Bozarth. Bozarth said he’d been spending money on a farm he bought three years before. “Now I hear my farm land will be taken in the project,” the Salamonie reservoir, he means. “Should I quit spending money?” 

Beamer said he didn’t know, and he referred the question to the Army Corps of Engineers’ Colonel Milne in Cincinnati. Milne replied, it depends on what land it is, can you ask him? Beamer did, and Bozarth answered, “I am enclosing the description and a plat of my farm. I would like to have it returned to me when you are finished with it. I want to thank you for your cooperation in getting this information for me. It has cleared up a lot of rumors around here.”

After Beamer forwarded that to Milne, Milne replied to Beamer that the part of Bozarth’s land in the “creek valleys” would be flooded. I did not find a letter from Beamer to Bozarth with that information in the John V. Beamer collection boxes 10 and 11 files in the rare books and manuscripts section at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis. 

In the spring of 1955, after Congressman Beamer wrote letters to the Wabash and Huntington newspapers, and testified before the House Appropriations Committee in support of funds for three dams and three reservoirs in the Upper Wabash Flood Control Program, he got another constituent letter on the topic. This was the one from Somerset Hardware owner Gene Smith. Can you tell me, Smith asks, May 10, 1955, what it means for Somerset? “Lots of rumors,” Smith wrote. 

“Rumors,” again. 

Like for Bozarth, Beamer forwarded Gene Smith’s question to Milne, who replied, May 25, “The height of the flood control pool at Somerset, Indiana would be approximately 75 feet above the stream bed and would cover the present site of the community (Milne).” 

That, Vern, three paragraphs into Milne's response, was the first acknowledgement that I came across that Somerset would drown. That’s why I’m mentioning it again. I did not find a letter from Beamer to Smith with that information in the John V. Beamer collection boxes 10 and 11 files in the rare books and manuscripts section at the Indiana State Library in Indianapolis. Either. 

Milne also told Beamer that the town would be moved to a place above the flood control pool, which prompted Beamer to then ask Milne for a map in a letter dated June 1, and more specific information about the move, “as promptly as possible.” And, oh, by the way, he inquired, “May I ask whether or not there is any possibility of the report being expedited in order that it could be reviewed by the Chief of Engineers, the Board of Engineers for Rivers and Harbors the Governor of Indiana and other interested agencies during this present session of the Congress.” Where’s that “interim report,” anyway? 

The day after June 1, 1955, when the Somerset-moving story made the Indianapolis News and Muncie Evening Press (1955), the Kokomo Tribune and the Bedford Daily Times-Mail ran an Associated Press story that said Beamer said he would oppose moving Somerset, and that he planned to investigate. Saying he would investigate was as far as the investigation would go. 

Interested Parties 

In 1971, a woman named Florence (Bowman) Roby wrote a 28-page mimeographed account for distribution at reunions and family gatherings that she called “Spotlight on Somerset High School and the Surrounding Community.” I got a copy from David Compton, the long-time Somerset resident I met at the Lions Club meeting. 

Florence graduated from Somerset High School in 1923 and taught second grade at Somerset elementary for 40 years, until it closed, and then for three years for the consolidated Southwood Elementary. Dad was too old by two years to have had her, but she was there in the building with him, and his younger siblings would have been in her class. She knew of him, I know, because Vern’s name appears when she included the 1932 sectional championship basketball team names in her writing. Brother Maurice and Pop’s cousin Robert are there, too. Maybe Florence was at the game. Like the Barbara Hershey character in the movie Hooisers. That’s a nice way to imagine it. 

Brother “Wendal” (sic) is among the 1941 sectional winner roster names she transcribed. Aunt Vernie ran the cafeteria. Wendell and siblings Wayne and Mary and Lenore, and maybe Burnell, and Bob’s daughter, Kay were Florence Roby’s students. How could she not know the Shroyers? 

Bob’s daughter Janet was not her student, Janet told me, because Mrs. Roby took a year off from teaching because she lost her only child in birth in 1946. That’s the year your great Aunt Linda was born. “Rebecca Ann” and Florence Roby are buried in the same cemetery as Vern. Florence Roby is a person I want my account to do justice. 

Florence Roby’s account of Somerset is the best one I’ve come across. She speaks straightforwardly about what the Upper Wabash Valley Flood Control Project meant to the people who lived in Somerset:

“The people at once became disturbed and despondent.”  

“Fear gripped their hearts, fear of losing their homes. What should they do? Where could they go? How could they go and leave their homes and neighbors that they had loved so long? Their lives were torn asunder. How cruel to be driven from their beloved town to perhaps new and distant places so foreign to them. Some became ill and it is thought were hastened to their death by this terrible experience. Some became angry. Still others did not believe that such a tragedy would ever happen. But that was only wishful thinking” (Roby, 1971). 

That’s what “75 feet above the stream bed” meant, you see, Vern. That’s what a seemingly off-hand third paragraph matter-of-fact comment from an engineer in an office 180 miles away meant. It meant there were victims.