To Holdouts, Offer to Buy Ohio Town Is Dust in Wind

Boots Hern, 82, is balancing atop a ladder in her denim skirt and sleeveless top, daubing white paint on her peeling front door. It is an act of defiance.

This Appalachian village, population 221, is about to be swallowed by one of the world’s largest electricity producers, an enormous coal-burning plant that sprawls right up to Cheshire’s backyards.

American Electric Power is negotiating to buy the entire town: the playground and the baseball field, the bait shop, the post office, the brick bungalows and the double-wide trailers. Company executives want their neighbors out so they can expand the plant--and put an end to irksome complaints about flyaway ash and sulfur plumes.

The deal is simple: The nation’s largest utility will pay more for Cheshire than it is worth, on the condition that residents go quietly, pledging not to sue American Electric for any illnesses they might be tempted to trace back to the plant.

Most locals have snapped up the offer. The City Council is moving to dissolve the town. County historians are taking pictures for the archives. The post office bulletin board is crammed with posters advertising property for sale outside Cheshire. Some residents already are packing.

“If you could have been here last night, you’d have wondered why I’d ever want to leave. There was a full moon over the river and it was beautiful,” said Elizabeth Bailey, 82, who has lived in Cheshire for three decades. “But as the old cliche goes, you don’t fight city hall.”

Boots Hern, clearly, puts no stock in cliche.

On a sticky August afternoon, she stands on that ladder and paints, grinning at her own saucy stubbornness. “See?” she says, waving the brush. “I’m not going anywhere.” The paint job is proof: She’s not leaving the house she and her husband built in 1954. “They can try to twist my arm, but I’m too old,” she calls down from the ladder. “My arm won’t twist.”

A few of her neighbors, perhaps half a dozen, have joined the resistance, refusing to negotiate. Some complain that American Electric, which reported revenues of $61 billion last year, is being too stingy. For homeowners, the offer amounts to roughly two to three times the assessed values of their properties.

Others simply refuse to leave the one-stoplight village where they raised their children, baked their pies, loved and lost, suffered and survived.

“This is where I set up housekeeping in February 1940, and I’m not going to give it up,” vowed Gladys Rife, 80.

If she has to live amid coal piles and listen to barges unloading night and day, Rife swears she’ll do it. If the pizza parlor and the beauty shop close, she intends to live in Cheshire all the same. If they bulldoze the red-brick church and she has to preach the Sunday sermon herself, she will, just so long as she can stay in her immaculate two-story house, freshly painted and crammed with a lifetime of memories.

“Let the mayor and the council people get out of town,” she scoffs. “I watched ‘em all grow up, but I can live without ‘em if I have to.”

The holdouts do have a slim hope of scuttling the deal. Town lawyers are compiling a final list of who’s in and who’s out. If the properties American Electric needs most for expansion are not included, the utility can withdraw its $20-million offer for Cheshire.

Still, most everyone here expects to be getting checks--and loading moving vans--within the next six to 12 months.

If the deal does go through, it may make history. Environmental contamination has forced the government to buy out several neighborhoods in recent decades, most famously Love Canal in upstate New York. Corporations, too, have at times moved neighbors away from polluting facilities; the Doe Run Co., for instance, is in the process of buying as many as 160 homes in Herculaneum, Mo., just south of St. Louis, so families can escape fallout from the nation’s largest lead smelter.

But officials who have dealt with environmental buyouts cannot think of another case in which a company has taken over an entire town.

The pending dissolution of Cheshire has attracted enormous interest, drawing French TV crews, German magazine writers and reporters from across the U.S. to this impoverished corner of southeast Ohio, where hay bales are scattered across the hilly pastures and cows meander right up to the two-lane roads.

Much of the media coverage has emphasized the presumed health risks of living just yards from the power plant’s twin smokestacks, which puff swirls of smudgy vapors 24 hours a day. In fact, though, few people in town seem much concerned about their health.

For decades, folks here have looked out at the smokestacks from their vegetable gardens and their backyard swings, from the schoolyard, from the playground. The vapors smearing the sky have been as much a part of the local landscape as the Ohio River. And few have given it much thought.

“It wasn’t anything that was a problem to us,” said Charles Reynolds, 57, who owns the bait shop.

Last summer, locals did notice a problem, touched off ironically when the utility installed new pollution-control equipment. The devices did not work properly together, and residents began to complain of burning eyes, blistered lips, nagging coughs and burn marks on their cars. Now and then, on muggy days, they would spot a blue haze hovering over the village, like exhaust from an alien spacecraft.

An outspoken few hired a lawyer. The gossip mill buzzed with rumors of a suit. Then, someone suggested, perhaps half in jest, that American Electric just buy the town out. To everyone’s astonishment, the utility agreed.

“The lawyers came to us and said, ‘These people don’t want to be your neighbors anymore, so maybe you can buy the town,’ ” plant manager Greg Massey said. “At first, you thought, ‘They’re crazy.’ And then you begin to think, ‘Well we do need the land along the riverfront [to unload coal], and the other property in town would be a good buffer zone. So maybe it’s not such a bad deal after all.’ ”

Since the deal was announced in April, most residents say there have been no major pollution problems. A $7-million repair job appears to have taken care of the blue haze and blistering air. The plant complies with federal and state air quality standards. (The Environmental Protection Agency has accused it only once in recent years of violating emission standards; plant operators are contesting that citation, suggesting the data were misinterpreted.)

Many residents--including a few who have been treated for cancer--go out of their way to say they do not believe the utility has caused any health problems. Indeed, several families plan to remain within breathing distance of the plant’s emissions when they move out of Cheshire.

To them, the crux of the deal is money: With the giant smokestacks, coal piles and conveyor belts looming over Cheshire, their property values are shot. They’re thrilled with what they see as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to unload their homes for at least twice the assessed values.

“We realize that even if there isn’t any pollution, it sure looks like there is,” said Scott Lucas, 70, a former mayor. “We would have been happy to stay here.... The danger is, if you don’t sell [to the plant], your house probably won’t be worth a dime.”

Property owners just outside the town limits see that danger clearly too, and are furious that they have been excluded from the deal.

Utility officials say they’re moving Cheshire residents as a matter of mutual convenience, not because of any health risks. So they have no intention of buying other properties, including the two schools just outside the town border or the scores of homes nearby.

Hand-lettered signs posted on property just outside Cheshire spell out the anger:

“Left Behind.” “Honk for Clean Air.” “Caution, Hazardous Waste.”

“They’re not even considering buying us out even though we’re breathing the same stuff,” said Milford Gilbert, 57, drawing on a cigarette. The wraparound wooden porch he is adding to his hilltop home looks straight at the power plant. A sign painted with a skull and crossbones looms from his lawn. “I guess the pollution must stop at the village limits,” he said.

The bitterness tears up many in town, among them Gladys Rife. She switches off an “Andy Griffith Show” rerun with a snort of disgust. “Cheshire is nothing like that,” she says, gesturing to the TV screen. “Honey, listen, this deal has caused more problems.... Friend against friend, neighbor against neighbor, family against family. So many hard feelings. I’m praying it doesn’t go through.”

If it does go through, it’s unclear just what will happen to Cheshire. American Electric may use some buildings as company housing. Others may be knocked down. The plant will likely build a new coal unloading station along the river. It may have to bend other expansion plans around scattered holdouts, like Rife and Hern.

“They say I’ll be lonely and afraid if everyone else goes. Well, I’ve got three dogs. I’ve got guns and they’re loaded and I know how to shoot them,” Boots Hern said. “I have my telephone. And I talk too much anyway.”

She has lived in Cheshire for 64 years. This is where she met her husband, Charlie; where she married him and where she buried him.

It’s where she hangs her clothes on a line to dry in the river breeze. Where she washes dishes while watching the Delta Queen cruise past her kitchen window. Sunsets streak the hills pink at dusk. Wildflowers parade in gold and purple. “There are memories,” she said.

“I’m happy right here.”