Key Principle
The book advances a single interlocking argument: subsistence farm life in Elkinsville, Indiana, produced extraordinary character -- not through instruction but through the structure of daily survival. Labor was public, mutual aid was mandatory, and parenting was communal. When eminent domain destroyed the physical community for the Monroe Reservoir (c. 1964), it severed land, community, and youth simultaneously, producing a threefold grief that resists resolution. Yet the character formed by that life proved portable, and the community's spirit refused erasure.
Cross frames this explicitly: "Elkinsville was like a living laboratory of hardship, challenge, responsibility, and a great amount of respect for the land and the people working to make a living." (back cover) The laboratory was destroyed, but its graduates carried the results.
Why This Matters
The book's stakes operate on two levels. Personally, the author cannot separate mourning for land, community, and youth because in Elkinsville they were structurally fused -- subsistence farming required mutual aid, and childhood was labor on that land. Destroying the place severed all three at once. Politically, the state's compensation model was "structurally blind to communal value" -- it treated interconnected families as individual property owners, with no vocabulary for appraising what the poems call "a soul connection, if you will without precedence" (p. 154).
The tension the book must hold: if the values transferred successfully beyond the valley, why does the loss still cut so deeply? The answer is psychological ownership. Years of physical labor on specific land entangled the self with the site. Displacement produced people who could never stop maintaining a place that no longer existed -- through oral retelling, reunion gatherings, and books like this one.
Good Examples
The social accountability loop: Subsistence farming made every household's work output publicly visible. Neglect brought communal shame; competence brought recognition -- which increased your labor burden, as neighbors recruited you for their tasks. This loop is the causal origin of the character type Elkinsville produced: "You really had to teach yourself to enjoy shoveling manure for the sheer satisfaction of giving the livestock a cleaner environment because most of the time that is all that was achieved." (Introduction)
The $5.00 Christmas budget: Lloyd Bruce's total Christmas allowance -- $5.00 for gifts to all seven siblings, spent at 5-15 cents per item from the Cline farm owners -- anchors the book's claim that poverty was real, not romanticized. His strategy of buying everyone combs and keeping the change is remembered with teasing affection, not shame, evidence that resourcefulness was a valued skill rather than an embarrassment. As Lloyd Bruce put it: "Each gift that you got was filled with hard labor, tons of love and a lot of prayers. As kids we didn't complain about what we got because we were taught what Christmas was all about." (p. 149)
The fourteen-year avoidance: Former residents did not visit the area for roughly fourteen years after displacement (c. 1963-1987). This was not indifference but active grief management -- returning would reactivate attachment to a place they could no longer maintain. As one resident explained: "I don't want to be reminded of our beautiful home and flower gardens I once had. I don't want to feel the wind blowing at a wonderful pace and reminding me of what I once had." (p. 171) When the reunion finally came in 1987, hosted at Bill Miller's farm, it drew 250-300 people. The pressure of suppressed attachment had been building for over a decade.
Counterpoints
The author's own caveat: The valley "was not always as romantic and picturesque as we would portray it to be" -- hardship genuinely cost something. The book acknowledges that character was forged through real deprivation, not idyllic simplicity. ("Our Home, Our Destiny")
Humility as vulnerability: The poem "This Town, Elkinsville" honors the community's character while indicting the government for exploiting it: "Humble folk, most didn't fight and took what you offered without another round" (p. 153). The virtues that made Elkinsville admirable also made it defenseless against displacement.
Heritage erasure was deliberate: Government buying teams were instructed to avoid personal connection with residents -- "don't bother to get close to the citizens as if you do the transition process will be delayed" (p. 153). The displacement machinery was designed to prevent the kind of communal relationship-building that might have slowed it. Families who asked to keep land above the waterline were refused under a wildlife rationale that converted displacement from engineering necessity into policy choice.
Key Quotes
"It's hard to know now if I am mourning over the loss of the land, the loss of the community, or the loss of my youth. Lord knows that all three stayed behind and met their fate under a watery grave." -- Cross, Introduction (p. 2)
"Something happens to you when you put that much of yourself into a place. Even though rationally you know that it is gone, you are forever doomed to maintain the upkeep. You never really let go." -- Cross, Introduction (p. 3)
"What the state could not hope to understand / Was how people had grown up here hand in hand. / There was a connection among residents, / A soul connection, if you will without precedence." -- "The Town That Was" poem (p. 154)
"Country parenting provided a method of character building which, when learned would last a lifetime and make the world a better place to live." -- Cross, "Country Parenting"
Rules of Thumb
- Character in Elkinsville was formed by structure, not instruction -- the demands of subsistence labor did the teaching, not sermons or edicts.
- Displacement grief in this book is always threefold (land, community, youth); treating it as mere property loss misreads every chapter.
- The community's oral tradition transfers attachment itself, not just facts -- second-generation members carry the loss without having lived it.
- Faith, mutual aid, and labor are not separate themes but a single interlocking system; isolating one distorts the others.
- The book is simultaneously elegy and policy critique -- it mourns what was lost and indicts the process that destroyed it.
- Anti-materialism in Elkinsville is adaptive, not aspirational -- success was measured in "character building blocks" because material accumulation was structurally impossible.
- The reunion is a grief ritual, not nostalgia -- it performs the continued "upkeep" on a place that no longer physically exists.
Related References
- characters - Cross family and founding families of Elkinsville
- labor and seasons - Subsistence farming cycle as character-formation evidence
- displacement - Eminent domain process and government tactics
- faith and community - Religion, mutual aid, and communal institutions