Town Drowning After Mississippi Flood : Illinois: The waters receded months ago, but the only thing thriving in Fults is weeds. Even the mayor lives out of town.

The Mississippi came and went, but it took something irreplaceable from the tiny Illinois river town of Fults.

When the river receded in October, after three months of fetid dominion over the southern Illinois bottoms, it washed away Fults’ fragile sense of community, its reason for existence.

Other Midwestern riverside towns have lost far more monetarily to last year’s great flood--the kind of losses that were visited again on towns in southwestern Georgia during this month’s flash-flooding.

But Fults, alone among them, is in danger of disappearing entirely from the map.

Most of the town’s original 90 inhabitants have scattered to other parts, and the six families who talk of returning are unsure whether there will be enough people left to run the town council and keep Fults from unincorporating. Even if there are, there will be little to govern.

“The river broke a lot of people’s spirits,” said Mayor Eugene Williams. “There’s not much to come back to.”

Williams presides over a phantom zone where once-hardy cypresses and maples are as bare and wretched as winter foliage, where abandoned houses poke up from untended lawns like rows of broken teeth. Williams’ only official task these days is to mow virulent patches of ironweed that sprout knee-high along Fults’ dusty roads. At night, even he retires to a federal trailer outside town--leaving Fults to its two remaining residents and damp fields of cicadas.

American towns die every year, killed off by the usual economic and spiritual malaise that has infected rural havens for more than a century. It is a slow process that often takes generations to set in, and even a place like Fults, barren of business and ignorant of its own history, can subsist for decades in a shrunken state, barely alive yet still a living community.

But last year’s flood had no mercy on the weak.

“It’s sad to see these towns go, but it’s the survival of the fittest,” said novelist William H. Gass, a small-town native and St. Louis resident whose fiction probes the heart of the heartland’s psyche. “The ones that won’t come back will be spared a living death. They’d be left with a population of talking memorial stones living in places that are more cemeteries than towns.”

In the year since the Mississippi and other Midwestern rivers rose up and swallowed their banks, state and federal authorities estimate that as many as 21,000 residents may have been left permanently displaced, forced to find new housing beyond the towns where they once lived. In most river communities, the numbers of those applying for federal buyouts or simply abandoning their ruined homes have been sparse enough to allow town life to pick up where it left off.

While many towns are slogging back to life and a few, like Valmeyer--just northwest of Fults--are moving to higher ground, beaten communities like Fults have been pitched into a struggle for their existence. Already on a downward spiral of failing economic vitality, these towns are now forced to contend with an exodus that threatens to wither their futures.

In West Alton, Mo., across the river from Fults and north of St. Louis, as many as 500 of the unincorporated village’s 1,000 residents may not return, and only a handful of businesses plan to reopen. Upriver in Alexandria, Mo., as much as half the population of 500 may not return, federal officials report.

Part of the reason for the exodus is the federal government’s buyout program, which has actively encouraged those living in the worst-hit areas to leave the flood plains. Many owners of shattered homes see the buyout as their only chance to sell off unreclaimable properties and recover what would otherwise be exorbitant losses. Even many of those who want to stay have applied for buyouts because the alternative--jacking up their homes as high as 14 feet to withstand future floods--is too costly.

Last December, Fults’ town board formally approved the federal buyout, making 25 of the town’s 32 homes eligible for government aid. Despite Mayor Williams’ worry that residents might be opting for the buyout too early, board members approved the aid package--fully realizing that their decision might doom the town.

“What’s more important, the future of a community or the welfare of its individual citizens?” said Herman Skaggs, a hazard mitigation specialist with the Federal Emergency Management Agency in Missouri. “Unfortunately for some of these marginal towns, their citizens are thinking about their own problems first. That’s their prerogative, and I don’t think they should have to make personal sacrifices so that their towns can stay afloat.”

Those abandoning communities where their ancestors lived for decades must awkwardly adjust to life inland, watching old friendships die and missing the everyday familiarity of small-town routine.

Fults native Tom Mosbacher, a long-distance trucker, almost moved his family to Arkansas but finally settled on a double-wide trailer perched in a mud field in the rolling hills above the flood plain five miles from Fults. He yearns for neighbors who “warn your kids they’re in trouble when you’re not around to keep an eye on them.” His towheaded 4-year-old, Chance, pines for playmates he never sees anymore. His wife, Shari, tries to regularly phone old friends but sighs that “it’s no substitute for knocking on their door.” The phone conversations wane with each passing month.

North of town, Pam and Gary Vogt have taken up residence in her mother’s old hillside home, but they have yet to decide where they will put down roots. Wherever they go, it will not be back to Fults.

She will miss Friday dusk softball games and the July children’s parade with its endless trays of hot dogs and its toddlers pedaling miniature John Deere tractors as they dress as clowns, cheerleaders and mailboxes. She will not miss last summer’s desolate boat rides out to her house or the endless petty thefts--of rosebud trellises, garden tools, her daughter’s dollhouse.

“I don’t think anybody in Fults wanted to move,” she said. “This is where the town belongs. But none of us wanted to go through any of the heartache again.”

Some return on weekends for an hour or so to sift through ruins. Others prefer to stay away, content with memories.

“We’ll be there in spirit even if the town ain’t,” Tom Mosbacher said. “When people ask me where I’m from, I always tell them, ‘Fults.’ ”

Merrill Prange says it without regret. Prange, 46, the gaptoothed treasurer of Monroe County, the Illinois jurisdiction that may ultimately decide Fults’ fate, is one of only two homeowners who have moved back.

Prange is the town’s conscience, the only one left who can speak knowledgeably about Fults’ origin in the early 1900s as a Union Pacific railroad spur and its 1937 incorporation after relying for years on card games as fund-raisers. He can talk too, though more reluctantly, about the town’s creeping loss of commercial vitality, the final days of its taverns, general stores and, recently, its sole remaining business, a grain elevator.

While others whose families date back generations--descendants of Bradshaws and Limestalls, the town’s original settlers--packed up and moved into the hills, Prange decided to return.

Like the others, he thought about leaving. But he would have had to give up his cherished back porch view of the limestone bluff that rises from the fertile bottoms just east of town. Prange, whose $60,000 home suffered nearly $30,000 in flood damage, still has his “million-dollar view”--even if there is no one left on his block to share it.

With loans and $12,000 in savings, Prange not only restored his flood-sodden house, he spent $11,000 to buy an abandoned clapboard building that housed Fults’ only church, St. John’s United Church of Christ.

The church’s 90-year-old congregation disbanded after the flood. They lost their pastor a month before the water came in, and so many parishioners said they would not be returning that the church board, in its last act, asked Prange to serve as caretaker of the town’s hillside cemetery.

He now drives up the eastward hill once a week to tend to 200 family grave sites, 10 times the number of Fults’ returning population.

“I’m not sure whether it’s honorable or stupid, but someone has to do it,” Prange said. “I just don’t want to see this town die.”

A county official himself, Prange approached the county’s commissioners recently to make sure they do not rush to kill off the town by revoking its charter.

Monroe County Commissioner Bob Ripplemeyer, who expects “it’s only a matter of time before they disenfranchise,” agreed to allow the town’s remaining residents to decide for themselves.

That decision may be forced on them if there are not enough returning Fults residents to staff the town’s governing board--a mayor, clerk, treasurer and five trustees.

“If everyone returns who say they’re coming back, we’ll have nine adults--one more than what we need to keep the town government functioning,” said Mayor Williams. Taking no chances, he has persuaded his wife, Ramona, to serve as town treasurer.

“But if anyone changes their mind or decides they don’t want to get involved, we’re sunk,” Williams said. “If we don’t have enough people to run the place, I guess we’ll have to ask the state to revoke our charter.”

For the moment, Williams can put it out of his mind. He has new aluminum siding to strip on his walls--mottled and warped by three months of Mississippi wave action. But when he returns to his weekly weeding, the seeming inevitability of the town’s fate returns.

Lacking residents, Fults has become a town of weeds, its environs clotted with horseweed, ironweed, wild petunias, grasses and stalks no one can identify.

A few former residents return with tractors and mowers to keep their lots trimmed. But most of the exiles have long given up on their lawns, just as they have given up on Fults itself.

The mayor has sent out official reminders to the town’s homeowners, sternly informing them that they have an obligation to keep up their properties, flood or no flood. Few comply.

In the end, it is Williams, still hoping against hope for his town’s future, who rumbles through the yards on his cherry-red Ford tractor.

“This was always such a clean town,” Williams shouted over the tractor’s droning motor. “Not so much anymore. I guess it don’t make much sense to keep a place clean if you’re never coming back.”