Fewer farm families now work and own the land around San Pierre where, like many Midwestern agricultural towns, residents have slowly left over the decades.
The young people who stay often work factory jobs in Valparaiso (30 miles north) or the suburbs of Chicago (about 80 miles northwest). Retired city dwellers, here to escape urban life, worry about stretching their dwindling retirement funds.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday, November 23, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 49 words Type of Material: Correction
Ethanol industry: In Tuesday's Section A, an article about the credit crunch scuttling a planned ethanol plant in San Pierre, Ind., misquoted a resident who opposed the plant. Dawn Danford said "some people are grateful for anything that helped kill off that ethanol plant" -- not "I am grateful."
That's the kind of glum chatter Freda Risner hears these days in The Oasis, her bar in San Pierre.
"Those people on Wall Street? They don't have the sense to know how they're hurting us," said Risner, 69. "That plant could have helped the county. It could have helped save San Pierre."
Outside, about all that's left of downtown San Pierre are three churches, two bars, a post office, a veterinarian and a used-car lot that never opens. Scott Harper bought the lot with his two brothers last fall as a side business near the family farm. When they heard about the ethanol project, the trio gleefully envisioned a financial trickle-down that would reach their pockets.
"We figured if we could just hold out long enough, the lot would do great," said Harper, 22, who lives and works on the family's farm eight miles south of town. But sales plummeted, then stalled. The brothers laid off their sole employee months ago. Now, they don't bother coming by the office. They listed the vehicles on EBay, but no one bid.
For some residents, the news of the ethanol plant's demise was cause for celebration. Dawn and Jason Danford have posted red and white signs reading "No Ethanol Plant" on the edge of their corn fields.
The farm couple, who helped spearhead a lawsuit to prevent the plant from being built, worried it would sap the town's water system and taint their wells. They warned neighbors and friends that the jobs at the plant would be filled by outsiders, and the tax benefits would be minor, at best.
"I'm not happy about the way the economy's going, but I'm grateful for anything that helped kill off that ethanol plant," said Dawn, 35, a mother of three.
The land where the ethanol plant would have been is muddy and empty. Its owners, expecting the field to be bulldozed and covered in blacktop, hadn't bothered to nurture the soil. They hope that, next year, this land will be thick with corn -- to be sold to an ethanol plant 35 miles southwest of here, in Rensselaer, Ind.
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p.j.huffstutter@latimes.com
