CHESHIRE, Ohio -- Nothing is going to drive Helen Preston from the weathered gray house where she was born 88 years ago. Not the plumes shooting from the nearby smokestacks. Not the power company that's about to buy most of the Appalachian village around her.
"I just couldn't stand to go out that door for the last time," said the oldest resident of Cheshire, population 221, a sprightly woman whose late husband's name, Edward S. Preston, remains on a plaque on her front door.
Instead, Preston and other elderly residents, whose memories are here in this one-stoplight town on the Ohio River, have struck a deal to sell their homes but remain living in them rent-free for the rest of their lives. They will watch Cheshire as they know it evaporate over the next few months.
"It's gonna be deserted," said Charles W. Searles, 82, perched on a stool at the post office on a recent rainy afternoon, chatting with neighbors as they came and went.
American Electric Power -- the nation's largest electricity producer -- is set to buy most of the village, enabling it to expand its plant and escape complaints about its emissions, notably a sulfuric acid haze, known around here as "the blue plume."
About 90 percent of Cheshire's homes will fall into company hands under the deal, which gives residents two to 3 1/2 times the assessed value of their property in exchange for a promise never to sue the company for health-related claims.
Younger folks agreed to take the money and made plans to move. A small group of holdouts, elderly residents such as Preston and Searles, got the life tenancy deal. And then there is Beulah "Boots" Hern, 82, among the handful who told the giant power company to keep its money.
Well, in Hern's case, to be precise, she has scoffed at the $242,700 the company offered her and demanded $1 million or nothing for her 1 1/2 -story white Cape Cod on nearly 2 acres of riverfront.
"I don't want to be living in somebody else's house," said Hern, a small woman who loves to ride her tractor and care for her own lawn. "I'm too old to be beholden to that company. I'm so old this arm won't twist."
Besides, Hern said, her life is here -- where she met her husband, Charlie, and proposed to him in 1946, built this house with him in 1954 and buried him in 1995 -- up on the hill just beyond her property.
Here, she gets to stand at her kitchen window and watch the moon shine on the river, and watch the Delta Queen and Mississippi Queen go by. When people ask if she's afraid to be left in an all-but-abandoned town, she reminds them that she has three dogs and three guns. Two of the guns are loaded.
"I know how to shoot 'em," she said. "And I'm a good shot."
Small river town
The village of Cheshire -- which borders the hulking coal-fired plant and its twin 830-foot smokestacks -- includes two churches, a post office, pizza place, a beauty shop, a bait shop, a park, a ball field, a gas station and minimart, a couple of village-owned buildings and a collection of bungalows, frame houses and double-wide trailers.
Settled in the mid-1800s by farmers, coal miners and rail yard workers, the hamlet evolved into a booming community by the early 1900s, home to the area's main hardware store, flour mill, blacksmith's shop, cotton vendor and post office.
When the Gen. James M. Gavin power plant was built in 1974, the town welcomed the more than 300 new jobs it brought along with the coal piles and overhead power lines.
Gladys Rife, 80, who moved here at age 14, describes a place where neighbors wandered in and out of one another's kitchens and young mothers gathered for afternoon picnics on the riverbank, children in playpens by their sides.
Sitting in a room where she gave birth to both her children, she recalled a favorite pastime of her youth: swimming across the river on summer days, getting a watermelon from a patch across the way and pushing it home.
What will remain of the village a year from now is anyone's guess. The buyout involves only homes, but the company isn't ruling out deals with other property owners. Some of the houses may be rented to company employees or contractors, but there's no telling how many will remain standing.
The village council is moving to dismantle the town government. The county historical society is photographing every building for posterity.
And even if the churches and pizza place, the gas station and minimart remain, people here wonder who will be left to support them.
Unusual bargain
The takeover is unusual in scope.
In the late 1970s, most of the town of Soldiers Grove, Wis., used federal aid to move to higher ground above the Kickapoo River after the last of a succession of floods wiped out the town.
And neighborhoods with environmental problems have been bought up elsewhere -- notably Love Canal in upstate New York and Times Beach, Mo., which were bought by the government.
But the Cheshire deal appears to be the nation's first pollution-related move that could uproot a whole town.
In this village 90 miles southeast of Columbus, the move to sell the town began in earnest last year after the power company installed a new system, ironically, to meet new and more stringent environmental standards.
The equipment, designed to limit emissions of nitrogen oxide, reacted with an existing emission-reduction system to produce the blue plume.
Townspeople reported burning eyes, headaches, nagging coughs, sore throats and burns on their lips, tongues and mouths.
The company says it fixed the problem right away, spending $7 million on the project. A federal report concluded that the emissions were not life-threatening but could aggravate health problems such as asthma.
That's when residents and village officials retained counsel to explore the idea of a lawsuit. Last spring, the lawyers approached AEP and -- almost casually -- tossed out the suggestion that the company buy the whole town.
"They said they no longer wanted to be our neighbor," said Ronald G. McDade, AEP's community liaison.
Offer came as surprise
To the town's surprise, the company agreed, offering $20 million for the village. (The figure later dropped to $19.5 million because some residents declined the offer.) Townspeople, summoned to a hastily arranged meeting, overwhelmingly supported the idea.
Ron and Lori Hammond jumped at the chance to leave. Their 8-year-old daughter, Abby, has had asthma since she was 2 weeks old, a condition that they say is made worse by the sulfur emissions and requiring her to often remain inside.
On summer days, as their two daughters swam in the backyard pool, the Hammonds kept one eye on the blue haze. If it was coming toward them, the girls would have to come in.
One night, the family awoke to hear what sounded like a barking seal. Abby had to be rushed to the emergency room.
"When you live in that kind of condition, it quits being a home," said Ron Hammond, 39, a village councilman. In the family's dining room, stacks of boxes await word of a completed deal.
But in time, it became clear that the opinion was not unanimous.
And bitter feelings have emerged among elderly residents who blame town leaders for selling them out -- for too little money, some say, given the company's reported revenues of $61 billion last year.
"I watched most of 'em grow up here," said Gladys Rife. "But you can't help but having hard feelings about what they did."
Impact could widen
As Cheshire empties out in the coming weeks and months, this may not be the end of the story. The buyout's ripple effects could reach as far as the haze from the burning coal.
Residents just outside the village line -- who were not eligible for the buyout -- have organized a group called Citizens Against Pollution. Scattered along the roadside are signs with such messages as "Left Behind," "Sale, Cemetery plots," and "$$ Nothing Solved."
"Our goal is not for a buyout; our goal is to make them clean up," said Paul Stinson, the group's president, whose back yard looks out on the plant.
The company is in compliance with federal and state air-quality standards. But Stinson and his group say the standards are so low it doesn't matter. A day after he washes his car and parks it in his driveway, it is coated with gray dust -- fly ash, he said. On certain humid days with little wind, he said, he and his neighbors have trouble breathing.
"There's not enough money that AEP can get their hands on to buy ground to solve the problem of the pollution that still pours out of that plant," he said.
Across the river in West Virginia, in communities that often find themselves downwind of the plumes, nearly 200 residents have signed a petition asking a local lawyer to investigate the effects of the plant's emissions on their health and property.
"We know from the buyout at [Cheshire] that AEP wants to pay more than top dollar for properties because of the diminution of value," said the lawyer, Raymond G. Musgrave. "I feel the people over here have a similar type of right if they wish to pursue it."