White Irrigators Blamed : Wells Go Dry for Residents of Black Illinois Township

As Ervin Ivy prepares for his daily trip to a friend’s water well, he can hear a noisy, unsettling hum breaking the calm of the rural dawn. It is the powerful whine of irrigation pumps sucking water out of the ground and into pipes buried beneath acres of thick, tall, green cornstalks that crowd the flat fields just across the road from his vegetable patch.

As the pumps strain, Ivy loads his car with plastic milk jugs and buckets he will haul several miles to fill with water for drinking, cooking and washing. Ivy has his own well, but it failed two weeks ago, as it has every summer for several years now.

“I don’t like it,” Ivy says in a voice that mixes resignation with anger. “Ninety-degree weather and no water to take a bath.”

Each evening, not far from Ivy’s house, Rebecca Strong and five relatives form a bucket brigade, passing empty jugs and pails toward a neighbor’s well across the road, and handing filled containers back toward their house. Two 55-gallon steel drums are parked under the eaves nearby to catch rainwater for flushing toilets. Afternoons, in the distance, Strong can look out of her front window and see the misty spray of giant irrigation systems in nearby cornfields.

“I’m out of water, but those crops can have all the water they need,” says Strong.

To the south, where irrigators pump water out of the aquifer for potato, melon and gladiolus crops, Byron Sandberg has run out of water for his hog barns. Bernice Runnels, who owns the barbershop and poolroom in Pembroke, is also out of water. So is the township’s volunteer fire station.

Wells providing water to as many as 200 Pembroke-area families began failing late last month, just as they have failed at the peak of the desert-like summer heat for the last four years. Residents blame increased irrigation by large-scale farmers, while farmers say longtime township residents possess outdated wells, some drilled half a century ago, and inadequate pumps.

David and Goliath

This water rights dispute between big agricultural interests and nearby residents is a David-and-Goliath confrontation set in a community 60 miles south of Chicago where life resembles the rural South more than the rural Midwest.

Residents of Pembroke Township, where the water problems are the most severe and widespread, are black and poor. Farmers who irrigate are white and prosperous.

But whites who live on the fringes of the township are also affected. Hog farmer Sandberg is white, and Strong says she has “met white people at the Laundromat who are there because they’re out of water too.”

Still, many blacks believe the drought they are being forced to endure is a racial issue. Irrigators say it is an economic problem affecting people too poor to improve their wells.

Land Proved Productive

Some blacks think whites are trying to drive them off land that once had no value but now--with irrigation--has proved productive. Whites say they do not want the land and do not mind blacks living there.

“It is a human problem with racial overtones,” says Billy Mitchell, the Pembroke school superintendent. “I just cannot believe that if this black community pulled the water . . . and caused (white) farmers to go dry that they would stand for it--not as long as we have.”

“We’re not irrigating out of spite or vengeance,” says Al Klepke, an assistant manager for nearby Cote Farms. “This is done on the farmers’ part so that we can stay in business. . . . If we don’t have water we won’t have much of a crop.”

Located off the main highways, Pembroke is a one-time swamp with sandy soil so poor that land-hungry homesteaders passed right by and never looked back when blacks began to settle there a century ago.

Squatters’ Land

“They used to call this squatters’ land,” recalls Gertrude Higginbottom, 65, granddaughter of early township residents.

After World War II, blacks moved there in great numbers when white land developers drained swamps and sold property by promoting it as a good environment for raising children, retiring or making a weekend escape from Chicago.

“It was that ‘Cabin in the Sky,’ ” says Mitchell, referring to the idyllic picture of black life Vincente Minnelli created in his 1943 all-black musical of the same name.

Today Pembroke “is 60 miles south and five light-years away from Chicago,” says Kenneth A. Leshen, a former Legal Aid attorney who is representing township residents in the water dispute. “By all indicia of poverty, it is one of the worst areas in the entire state of Illinois.”

Junk-Littered Fields

At least 5,000 people live in Pembroke, most of them on roads that are not blacktop or even gravel, but sand--soft, shifting yellow trails crossing a countryside spotted with ramshackle little churches, tar-paper and wood shacks and occasional brick houses separated by weedy, junk-littered fields and cultivated squares of vegetables. Unexpected clumps of poplar and oak trees punctuate the terrain like bunches of exclamation points.

“That whole area is like a forgotten area where the poor are hidden,” says Susan Stolfa, a consultant with the Catholic Campaign for Human Development.

“It’s an awful place,” says Jerome J. Joyce, the area’s state senator and an advocate for residents without water.

“This is a minority community that nobody seems to want to do anything to help,” Mitchell says.

‘Country Living’

“People come out here for country living,” says Napoleon Haney, mayor of the village of Hopkins Park, part of Pembroke. “But sometimes it’s not what they thought it was supposed to be.”

There is virtually no industry in Pembroke. An estimated 60% of the population is unemployed, half the residents live below the poverty level and half depend on some sort of fixed income ranging from welfare to Social Security. Seventh grade is the average level of educational achievement. There are no doctors or lawyers.

There is no water system in place and sewer lines were only recently installed for part of the township. There is one volunteer fire station to serve the 56-square-mile township. Police protection is minimal. A recent survey found more than 400 abandoned buildings in the community. Most of the roads, such as they are, go unplowed in winter and ungraded in summer.

“I can’t figure out why so many hard things come against Pembroke,” says Herman Myles, 74, who has lived here for 32 years and farms 25 acres.

Put Under the Rug

“This is worse than Mississippi,” says Higginbottom, 65, born and reared in Pembroke. “In Mississippi you know what you’re getting. Here they sift you under the rug, and it’s goodby.”

Water problems began in Pembroke and in neighboring areas across the border in Indiana in 1982, one year after The Prudential Insurance Co. of America, a major agricultural landowner in the Midwest, installed more than 30 wells and irrigation systems on part of its 23,000-acre farm in Indiana and on its 4,500 Illinois acres in Pembroke.

The powerful Prudential wells, tapping an aquifer that is 100 feet to 150 feet below the surface of the land, sharply increased the water being pumped.

“For 50 years the man living next to me never irrigated,” says Higginbottom. “As soon as he sold out to Prudential, that’s when I started to have problems. I got up one morning, turned on the faucet and no water. Cost me $1,000 to drill my well deeper.”

Older wells began drying up and their pumps, now forced to run day and night, began burning out. In Newton and Jasper counties, on the Indiana side of the border, a group of residents filed a federal court suit against Prudential. In a 1985 out-of-court settlement, 35 Indiana residents reportedly shared $1.1 million to replace existing wells and to cover some damages caused by the water problems.

Declines to Discuss Lawsuit

“It was just a big company that tried to engage in farming on a grand scale and didn’t know what it was doing,” says Jack Nesbitt, a lawyer who represented the Indiana residents but who declined to discuss specifics of the settlement. “What it was, was huge corporate America against a bunch of farmers that loved their place and wanted to keep it.”

A spokesman for Prudential, which stopped irrigating in Illinois and curtailed irrigation in Indiana after the litigation, declined to discuss the suit or the settlement, which affected only Indiana residents.

Pembroke residents are only now considering a similar suit against irrigators.

Impoverished and Black

“The real problem for Pembroke Township is they’re impoverished black people,” Nesbitt says. “They don’t have any money. These (Indiana) farmers were impoverished farmers, but an impoverished farmer can scrape up $5,000. An impoverished black person can’t. And that’s the main problem. They don’t have the resources and tools to resist corporate America. . . . And it’s just a desperately sad situation. You can’t put up $5,000 to put up a lawsuit if you’ve got only 20 acres. If you have 640 acres, you see it as an economic thing, and you have no other choice.”

With recent assistance from an organizer with the Family Farm Organizing Resource Center and the Land Stewardship Project, and with money from the Catholic Campaign for Human Development and small foundations, township residents successfully campaigned for legislation requiring state curbs on irrigation when nearby wells begin to run dry. Two bills are on the desk of Illinois Gov. James R. Thompson, but large farm organizations and irrigators are pressing him to veto them.

Farm Bureau Requests Study

“The bill is very restrictive. We think there needs to be more study before there are laws,” says Bob Dyer, manager of the Kankakee Farm Bureau.

“If they could get some money together from the state to help them with their wells, that would solve the problem,” says Ken Miedema, a gladiolus farmer. “They have a legitimate bitch that they’re having water troubles. When you run out of water, you have troubles. But we don’t need laws. But this is strictly an economics problem. . . . And there isn’t an irrigator who thinks it’s racial.”

‘Something for Nothing’

“All they want is someone to come and give them something for nothing,” says Richard W. Wehling, an engineer and well expert who spoke on behalf of some irrigators. “Why hit a guy in the head who’s trying to make a living when the other guy is sitting across the road under a shade tree saying, ‘Give me water.’ When they heard that Prudential made a big settlement (in Indiana), they thought they could get a free well.”

Meanwhile, a study is under way to learn about the aquifer under Pembroke--a study almost identical to one done more than two years ago on the Indiana side of the border. Farmers would like Gov. Thompson to wait until that study is completed sometime next year before signing laws that might impose controls on irrigation.

That delay does not sit well with people like Rebecca Strong.

“I’ve got a brand new washer, and I have to drive my laundry 13 miles to the next town to the Laundromat. They irrigate potatoes, and we carry water in plastic bottles.

‘The American Dream’

“This is supposed to be the American dream,” says Strong. “To own your own home so you can pass it on to your children, not to pack up and move just when you acquired something.

“But how can you make it,” she asks, “when they take your water every summer?”

“People are very disturbed,” says Hopkins Park Mayor Haney. “Anyone would be in this hot weather--hot as it’s been, 100 degrees and better, and your well is dry. When you don’t have water, well, you know, that’s just taking a person’s life.”

Researcher Wendy Leopold in Chicago contributed to this story.