Library
Elkinsville, Indiana: The Town That Was · 8 of 13
Elkinsville, Indiana: The Town That Was
ARG Design HIGH

Memory Preservation as Community Act

Elkinsville, Indiana: The Town That Was Elkinsville Editorial Committee
memory preservation reunion newsletter monument oral-history cemetery

Key Principle

Every section of the book participates in deliberate memory work, but the preservation was not accidental or sentimental — it was structured resistance against institutional erasure. The editorial method was explicit: publish imperfect collective memory rather than silence; leave contradictions unresolved; treat each narrator's account as testimony rather than fact. "Each story is how the person submitting the story remembered these happenings" (Chapter: Introduction). The result is a community-authored archive that functions as a collective act of refusal: the community ceased to exist as a physical place in 1964, but it refused to cease existing as a social fact.

The preservation system had multiple interlocking layers: the Elkinsville Cemetery Association (formed 1974) provided a physical anchor; annual reunions (begun August 1987) provided temporal rhythm; the Elkinsville Newsletter (launched November 1997, approximately 100 subscribers) provided year-round communication; the Monument of Hope (unveiled October 3, 1999) provided a permanent physical inscription of the twenty displaced families. The book itself completed the system by creating a transmissible record.

Why This Matters

Displacement does not end when families leave — it continues as long as institutional erasure goes uncontested. The Elkinsville community understood this implicitly. Robert Cross captured it directly: "We are the lucky ones because we have the memories which cannot be bought by anyone nor taken away from our lives." (Chapter: General Stores) The corollary is that memories without containers — without annual reunions, newsletters, and physical monuments — fade with the generation that holds them.

The editors' methodological choice to preserve contradictions was not a failure of rigor but a preservation strategy. An authoritative corrected narrative would have suppressed minority memories, silenced people who remembered differently, and produced a text that fewer community members recognized as their own. By contrast, a text where "Chester Followell, Clyde Followell, Lova Sipes, and the editorial committee each name slightly different sequences" of store owners is a text in which every remembered version survives (Chapter: General Stores; Family Stories — Followell, Sipes). The incompleteness of the Memorial List — acknowledged with the note that diaspora made complete tracking impossible — carries the same logic: an imperfect record is better than no record.

Good Examples

The Monument of Hope: Built between the Hessman and Roy Followell houses at the former Elkinsville site, unveiled October 3, 1999. The back face lists all twenty displaced families: Bohall, Bowman, Bruce, Crider, Cross, Deckard, Ferguson, Followell, Graham, Hanner, Lucas, Lutes, Miller, Parks, Robertson, Sipes, Stines, Stogdill, Wilkerson. A destroyed town transformed into a permanent presence. The committee rejected a shelter house proposal that would have required maintenance by current residents and potentially attracted disruptive visitors — evidence that the preservation ethic was itself governed by the mutual-aid principle of not burdening neighbors (Chapter: Reunion and Newsletter).

Bramble Stogdill's tape-recorded oral history: Bramble (1896–1992) recorded his memoir on tape for transmission to future generations — a medium chosen precisely because his age made writing impractical. Nancy (Bruce) Deckard transcribed and edited it for the book. The taping captured details that no written record would have preserved: the postal inspector's verdict about roads, the 1908 tombstone purchase for Uncle William, the hay sled to Malcolm Lucas Hill. His death at age 95 did not end the record because he had already transferred it (Chapter: Family Stories — Bramble Stogdill).

Stogdill family pilgrimages to Malcolm Lucas Hill (1908–1999): William Stogdill (1838–1865), excluded from Elkinsville Cemetery, was buried on Malcolm Lucas Hill. James Harvey Stogdill purchased a tombstone 43 years later. Bramble visited the grave in 1908, 1976, 1984, and 1987. In 1984, family members carried water, mortar, and wire up the hill to repair the fallen stone. By 1987, accessing the grave required a conservation officer's four-wheel-drive truck. After Bramble's death in 1992, nieces and nephews continued pilgrimages through 1999 — nearly a century of family commitment to a single grave (Chapter: Family Stories — Bramble Stogdill, Cecil Stogdill).

Counterpoints

Individual memory acts cannot survive without institutional containers: Radia Wilkerson transplanted flowers to each new home the family occupied after displacement, maintaining continuity through plants she had grown and tended. Connie Schooler maintained her great-grandmother's orange day lily bulbs in Arizona. These are powerful acts of personal preservation, but they depend on individuals remaining alive and committed. The institutional structures — the reunion, the newsletter, the cemetery association — are precisely what makes preservation transmissible across generations when the original witnesses die (Chapter: Family Stories — Wilkerson; Introduction).

The reunion itself was not self-starting: The first reunion in August 1987 happened because Karen (Ayers) Zody approached Bill Miller, who offered his property (formerly Carl Hall's) as the venue. Miller then suggested moving the date to the first Sunday in October to avoid summer heat. The committee's subsequent formalization — Miller deeding reunion rights to the committee, transferable to future property owners — converted a personal hospitality act into a durable institution. Preservation required this kind of intentional engineering (Chapter: Reunion and Newsletter).

Newspaper reprints served memory but not fact-checking: Segrid Jordan's 1970 article and Dick Reed's 1973 profile of Ed Wilkerson were reprinted in the book as primary sources. These capture real-time testimony from the final residents. But they also reflect the journalists' framing and selection — they are partial records, not comprehensive ones. The book's decision to include them without annotation follows the same "preserve as-is" methodology, which means errors in the original articles are preserved too (Chapter: Family Stories — Followell, Wilkerson).

Key Quotes

"Folks in Elkinsville not only lost their homes but they also lost their legacy. For those who had lived on the land the longest, they virtually lost their self-identity and were forced to release a past, at one time thought to be the future." — Elkinsville Editorial Committee, Chapter: Introduction

"'But there's no town,' some folks may say / To which others smile and declare / 'Its spirit never went away / You'll catch it, for tis in the air.'" — R. Lowell "Ted" DaVee, Chapter: Poems

"The simplicity and homeliness and just plain 'Rural America' must never be allowed to dim from our memories and be replaced by the rush, speed and concrete jungles which the present generation will draw their memories from." — Robert Cross, Chapter: General Stores

"Families who moved away in 1964 had, among other things, a common bond with the Elkinsville area aside from friendships and this was the Elkinsville Cemetery." — Elkinsville Editorial Committee, Chapter: Reunion and Newsletter

Rules of Thumb

  • Memory preservation requires institutional containers (annual events, newsletters, physical monuments) in addition to individual acts — oral histories and transplanted gardens die with their keepers.
  • Preserve contradictions in community memory rather than adjudicating them; the act of choosing an authoritative version suppresses minority memories and reduces community ownership of the record.
  • Cemeteries are often the last institution standing after displacement and should be formalized as associations (with legal standing) as early as possible — Elkinsville's Cemetery Association formed in 1974, a decade after the town's dissolution.
  • The gap between displacement and the first reunion (1964 to 1987 — twenty-three years) shows how long it can take for a dispersed community to rebuild social infrastructure; shorter gaps are possible with deliberate effort.
  • Physical monuments serve a different function than newsletters or reunions: they inscribe the community's existence permanently at the site of erasure, contesting the landscape's silent testimony that nothing was there.

Related References