a documented

local history

​

creative non fiction

​

memoir

​

in development with

​

Wise Ink Media

 

for

release

2025

 

 

When Once Destroyed ...

​

....is the story of a self-contained, contented rural community destroyed by the unstoppable forces of large-scale post-war American modernization,  drowned by a flood control project that began with one man's idea of a man-made lake for recreation. 

​

In gathering stories from friends and relatives for a letter to my grandson who shares my father's name, I discover what life was like for Dad, Vern Shroyer. And, with years of research, I learn the hiddern details behind the Army's destruction of his rural boyhood home and community. In the telling I draw upon my experience as a Holocaust educator in a rural homogeneous northern Indiana high school, New Prairie High School, New Carlise, Indiana. People who were betrayed mourn a culture that has been vanquished. 

 

The letter to my grandson has become an immersion into the destruction of lives like those familiar to the readers of Marilyn Robinson and Wendell Berry. As is the tradition, I am now the grandfather in the telling of a grandparent story.