“The very things you would want to come to Southwestern Indiana for, that highway would destroy.” —Joe Gilooly

With so little common ground in the debate, there is one thing that both sides agree on: They are looking out for the best interests of the people of Southwestern Indiana. While opponents of the interstate point to the Eugene Stolls who will be the victims of the new highway, reports from the state Transportation Department say the main purpose of the highway is to provide economic development to Daviess, Gibson, Greene and Pike counties along the I-69 path. It’s an area of Indiana Brian Howey refers to in this issue as the “sleepy backwater quadrant of the Hoosier state.” It’s an area of Indiana that many of us don’t know very well.

The visit to Eugene Stoll’s farm was one stop in a trip over the portion of the proposed I-69 route that would cut through the rolling hills nestled against the flatland outside the Daviess County seat of Washington. The trip began at Jim and Jane Gilooly’s farm, where they grow hybrid seed corn and raise Angus cattle.

Tall and athletic looking, with a graying head of hair and silver bifocals, Jim Gilooly is part of the fourth generation of his family to be farming this land. With a son-in-law already working in the seed business and a son at Purdue preparing to run the cattle business, the next generation is already in place. Farm Bureau named Gilooly as its 1998 Indiana Farmer of the Year, and he fits the image of the 21st century farmer. He wears jeans and plaid shirts and boots, but he’s got a master’s degree in genetics and animal breeding from Penn State. He runs the farm as a business with three full-time employees and a half-dozen more at harvest time. The Giloolys’ kids are the fifth generation to grow up in the same farmhouse, but Gilooly has traveled as far as South Africa to evaluate prize cattle.

Gilooly is no neutral party in the I-69 debate. After we climb into his GMC Jimmy to drive the proposed highway route, our first stop is on his own land.

I-69 would cut diagonally through the country his family has farmed for 80 years, and the highway would almost certainly drive the family and the business off the land. Gilooly hasn’t talked to state officials about possible compensation for his land, and he doesn’t want to. Not surprisingly, Gilooly doesn’t think much of the notion that the purpose of the highway is to help out his part of the state.

“Let’s be honest about this: The reason you build an interstate between two different points is so people don’t have to slow down between those points,” he says. He pauses as we pass an interstate-path pond where a tow-headed toddler and his father are feeding geese. “That interstate is not designed to help this or any other county along the way.”

The road-blockers

As we drive along the route, Gilooly points out a wetland that will have to be filled in by interstate builders, a farmhouse that would have to be torn down, the main county road that would need to be closed. He gives the names of the families whose farms would be destroyed. He identifies the wildlife affected. He shares anecdotes about the struggle against the highway. He is neither a politician or a public relations expert, but Gilooly knows how to fill up a reporter’s notebook: Since he and Jane were first convinced by their minister to actively fight against I-69, Gilooly has played host to ABC, NBC and the Wall Street Journal, among other media. When he accepted the Farmer of the Year award, he took the opportunity to tell the banquet crowd of some 3,000 people that I-69 was a bad idea. Sitting at the front table was Gov. O’Bannon.

If the I-69 fight has made Jim Gilooly an unlikely rebel, he’s right at home in an opposition movement that is characterized by its strange bedfellows. Bloomington environmentalists are on the same side as The Indianapolis Star, one of 14 newspapers to editorialize against the I-69 project. The National Family Farm Coalition, Ralph Nader, Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Hoosier Environmental Council are as one against the highway. Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 157, the Greater Greencastle Chamber of Commerce and the Concerned Clergy of Indianapolis are a few of the hundreds of organizations that have come together on this one.

The breadth of the opposition is impressive not only for its diversity, but for its reflection of popular sentiment. When the Bloomington City Council took public comment before voting on the new I-69 route, four citizens spoke in favor of the highway. Forty-nine spoke against it. Two recent polls show that Evansville residents, presumably the biggest beneficiaries of the faster I-69 access to Indianapolis, actually favored the I-70/U.S. 41 alternative.

Although most of the I-69 opponents appear to be motivated chiefly by concerns about preserving the environment and a rural quality of life, the resistance draws strength and solidarity from growing resentment over international trade agreements that have led to the loss of American manufacturing jobs. This is the part of the state where RCA/Thomson employed over 1,000 people in what was once the world’s largest television manufacturing plant. Folks haven’t forgotten that the Bloomington plant was closed in 1997 and the jobs moved to Mexico, and many people share the notion that an I-69 fast lane to the southern border will only exacerbate the loss of jobs seen since the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).

Again, the alliances are surprising. It’s not every day that Daviess County farmers express solidarity with Seattle protesters at the World Trade Organization meeting. Some of the Seattle protesters were arrested while wearing sea turtle costumes, for goodness sake. But Gilooly sees a connection. “Hell, if they do build this highway, they will only need two lanes, not four,” he says. “The first two years, it will be one-way travel to Mexico with American jobs. The next two years, they can reverse the road so the stuff they manufacture down there can come up here to be sold.”

“Those poor people in Southwestern Indiana”

We continue to drive the interstate route, past Bethel United Methodist Church, built in 1815 and flanked by the graveyard where Gilooly’s father is buried. We pass farms with soil considered to be some of the very richest in Indiana. We have a short wait on a gravel road while 16 escaped cows slowly cross in front of the Jimmy. Then we pull into the Boyd Grain complex.

Gilooly clearly admires Tom Boyd and his brother Steve, who between them farm some 8,000 acres in a business started essentially from scratch. “This is what they say you can’t do any more in American farming,” Gilooly says. Huge gray silos mark the area where 40 semi-trailer trucks and 50 employees raise, harvest and deliver grain throughout the country — without the need for a nearby interstate highway.

We get out of the Jimmy, walk between the silos and face the Boyd family home to the north. Again, we are standing in the middle of what would be Interstate 69. Gilooly cites a study that says Daviess County can expect to get four jobs a year created by the new highway. He looks around at the thriving business that would likely be destroyed, and shakes his head. “This is unacceptable.”

Gilooly and other farmers are plainly frustrated by the highway plans’ elevation of the need for convenient transportation over the value of the enormous amount of food production that goes on in this part of the state. Gilooly says the highway and its connected construction would destroy far more than the estimated 3,000 acres of lost farmland would suggest, and he questions the priorities of those who would accept the trade-off. “If you can’t get from point A to point B as quickly as you like, that’s a nuisance,” he says. “But if you don’t have enough food to eat, that’s a problem.”

As for the supposed economic benefits that I-69 would bring to Daviess County, Gilooly and others here say they don’t need the kind of help the highway would bring, thank you very much. The county’s per capita income ranks 71st out of Indiana’s 92 counties, a figure skewed by the thousands of Amish here who happily embrace poverty as it is defined by the cold numbers of census data. Gilooly acknowledges that, like any other community, Daviess County has its problems. But as we drive past tidy farms, newly constructed homes and apparently thriving businesses in and outside the town of Washington, Gilooly gently mocks the argument that the interstate would bring economic salvation. “Oh, those poor people in Southwestern Indiana,” he laughs to the Indianapolis reporter. “We have to build a highway to help them.”

Finally, the Jimmy begins to climb one of the rolling hills that resisted the Illinoisan age glaciers which formed the flat farmland of this country some 300,000 years ago. Gilooly parks the Jimmy on the top of a knob where we get a panoramic view of land that would become I-69. Below the trees, we can see the wetlands and the vast tracts of earth tilled by the Boyds and other modern farmers.

Farther north and a little to the west, we can see the smaller five to 10-acre farms belonging to Eugene Stoll and other Amish families. John Garber’s dairy farm and old John Wagner Jr.’s place are out there, right in the path of the interstate. The Daviess County Amish, who do not vote and usually shun the political process altogether, twice gathered over 700 signatures from their community on petitions asking the governor to reconsider the I-69 plan. “We don’t usually do this sort of thing,” Eugene Stoll admits.

The only problem with collecting the signatures was that the very families whose land would be lost to the interstate were reluctant to argue against the plan. They feared that if they complained, the state might re-route the highway and visit their misfortune on their neighbors.

Now we look down and see a pickup truck pass a horse-drawn buggy going opposite directions down one of the county roads. We are too far away to confirm it, but the custom here would suggest they waved greetings as they crossed paths. It’s quiet for a moment, and then Gilooly speaks. “The very things you would want to come to Southwestern Indiana for, that highway would destroy.”

fquigley@nuvo.net

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