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Elkinsville, Indiana: The Town That Was · 5 of 13
Elkinsville, Indiana: The Town That Was
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Freedom as the Defining Loss

Elkinsville, Indiana: The Town That Was Elkinsville Editorial Committee
freedom displacement-grief childhood landscape-identity memory irreversibility

Key Principle

Former Elkinsville residents do not primarily describe their loss in terms of property, income, or institutional services. They describe it as the loss of freedom — not political freedom but experiential freedom: unsupervised childhood roaming, open landscape, walking distance to everything, no locks on doors, no anxiety about security, knowing everyone and being known. Multiple narrators explicitly state this freedom cannot be reconstituted elsewhere. The loss is irreversible rather than merely unfortunate because the conditions that produced it — geographic isolation, low population density, complete mutual familiarity, walkable scale — cannot be artificially reassembled.

Why This Matters

The gap between what eminent domain can compensate and what displacement actually destroys is most visible in this theme. Property values can be appraised; "the freedom we had in Elkinsville" cannot. Sharon (Lucas) Thompson writes: "When I think of Elkinsville, I think of the freedom we all had, how pretty it was, the way the air was so fresh, and how we all were friends and looked out for each other. We don't have the freedom anymore like we had in Elkinsville." The present tense is deliberate — decades after displacement, the loss is still active.

This freedom was produced by specific material conditions: a community at walkable scale where every adult knew every child; a landscape of hills, creeks, and forests that invited exploration without danger from strangers; a daily life structured around shared tasks and shared places rather than private consumption. Albert William Cross identifies WWII — not the reservoir — as the moment the social contract that made this freedom possible began to erode: before the war, doors were unlocked and property respected because community interdependence enforced good behavior. The reservoir finished what modernity had begun. This framing makes the loss doubly irreversible: even if the land were returned, the social conditions are gone.

Good Examples

Sharon Thompson's explicit statement: "When I think of Elkinsville, I think of the freedom we all had, how pretty it was, the way the air was so fresh, and how we all were friends and looked out for each other. We don't have the freedom anymore like we had in Elkinsville." Thompson then describes the specific content of that freedom: sleigh riding at John Lutes hill, grapevine swinging at the Grahams, creek swimming, unsupervised roaming across the landscape. These are not abstract claims but inventories of lost activity. (Chapter: Family Stories — Thompson/Lucas)

Robert Cross on Elkinsville School: "Searching my memory, I cannot remember any time being boring or uninteresting. There just seemed to be something to do all the time regardless of weather condition." Cross's description of school life — seasonal rhythms, swimming in Salt Creek, kite-flying at recess, climbing Browning Mountain on field trips — constitutes a catalog of the embodied freedom that the one-room school made possible. The school was not a container for learning; it was an institution embedded in the landscape that produced the freedom of that landscape. (Chapter: Schools)

Linda Kay Lane: "feeling free" as the dominant memory. "Some of my fondest memories of living near Elkinsville were being in the country and feeling free. My favorite pastime was venturing out on my own and climbing the hills." Lane relocated in fall 1963 when the Corps bought the family farm. The spatial freedom — venturing out alone, climbing hills — is what she names as defining, not the house or the farm itself. (Chapter: Family Stories — Lucas/Lane)

Robert Cross, "Brown County Hills: A Place I Call Home" (poem): Cross's formal poetic expression of this theme appears in the Poems section, which includes multiple community-authored verses anchoring Elkinsville identity to the Brown County landscape. "But more than a store, Story represented a niche in time. A way of life — a feeling of community." The poem and the memoir sections reinforce each other: what is lost is a mode of being, not a collection of buildings. (Chapter: General Stores; Poems)

Counterpoints

The freedom came with real physical danger. Shivarees — the Appalachian-influenced post-wedding prank tradition — could turn fatal: Elza Lucas's son Otis was shot dead when someone fired into the air during a shivaree. Seasonal flooding stranded families for weeks. Bramble Stogdill's knife wound became an amputation because back waters blocked transport. The "freedom" narrators describe was inseparable from isolation and its attendant risks. (Chapter: Family Stories — Bruce; Family Stories — Bramble Stogdill)

Post-WWII modernization had already begun eroding the conditions. Albert William Cross identifies Pearl Harbor and the post-war period as the break point: "Many of the old faces and friends were gone." Electricity brought television; modernity brought a "more hostile and aggressive way of life." The reservoir accelerated a process already underway; it did not cause it from scratch. (Chapter: Family Stories — Cross)

The Depression was experienced as normalcy, not deprivation. "We didn't have many toys. It was the Depression and there just wasn't much money" — yet narrators report not feeling poor. The freedom of Elkinsville childhood was partly produced by the absence of commercial alternatives, not despite poverty but alongside it. Displacement into urban life did not introduce poverty; it made poverty visible by surrounding it with visible wealth. (Chapter: Family Stories — Mobley; Family Stories — Bowman)

Key Quotes

"When I think of Elkinsville, I think of the freedom we all had, how pretty it was, the way the air was so fresh, and how we all were friends and looked out for each other. We don't have the freedom anymore like we had in Elkinsville." — Sharon (Lucas) Thompson, Chapter: Family Stories — Thompson/Lucas

"Some of my fondest memories of living near Elkinsville were being in the country and feeling free. My favorite pastime was venturing out on my own and climbing the hills." — Linda Kay (Cross) Lane, Chapter: Family Stories — Lucas/Lane

"Searching my memory, I cannot remember any time being boring or uninteresting. There just seemed to be something to do all the time regardless of weather condition." — Robert Cross, Chapter: Schools

"1964 brought the final destruction not only to a physical entity but to a way of life which is not duplicated in our normal day-to-day routines." — Robert Cross, Chapter: General Stores

Rules of Thumb

  • When documenting displacement, ask what mode of daily life is being destroyed, not only what property is being taken — the gap between compensable loss and actual loss is widest at the experiential level.
  • Freedom as former residents define it is produced by specific material conditions (walkable scale, mutual familiarity, open landscape); it cannot be reconstituted by moving a community to a new location with better housing.
  • Narrators who describe their loss as irreversible rather than merely unfortunate are making a structural claim: the conditions that produced the lost experience no longer exist anywhere, not just in the former location.
  • The poems section of a community memoir is the community's most direct formal expression of what it considers irreplaceable — read it as thesis statement, not ornamentation.

Related References