On Centre: Bald Eagle Area

Dam drowned hopes, dreams

Chris Rosenblum

Forty years ago, one valley ended and another began.

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When the Foster Joseph Sayers Dam near Blanchard was completed in August 1969, backing up Bald Eagle Creek and creating the lake of the same name, Howard became a peninsula. Around the town drowned stretches of Howard and Liberty townships once home to farms, churches and businesses.

All were gone by then, bulldozed or burned to the ground two years earlier — an upheaval chronicled by Howard resident Russell Holter.

Holter’s self-published 2007 book, “A Dam Shame: The True Story of the Foster Sayers Dam,” recounts the anguish displaced farmers and others felt seeing their homesteads destroyed, ostensibly for flood control.

For Holter, descended from valley pioneers, it’s personal history.

He and his mother and older brother lost their home. So did his uncle, Oscar “Pete” Pletcher, and unmarried aunt, Irene Pletcher, who lived beside old U.S. Route 220 on land farmed for more than a century.

Senior citizens, they were the last among their neighbors to move. Pete Pletcher never fully adjusted and died a year later. Within a month, his sister joined him.

“As far back as their roots went, losing a farm was a catastrophe,” Holter said. “It was very upsetting to them.”

Not everything vanished like the Fairview Church or the Be-Bop Ice Cream Shop, Some houses were moved. Graves were relocated to present-day Schencks Cemetery.

Bitterness also remained. Holter says angry residents argued that Lock Haven, miles downstream, should have built levees or taken other steps to stay dry.

Their land, they believed, was seized mainly for a recreation area — a suspicion only deepened when Lock Haven, despite the dam, needed dikes after all after the 1972 floods.

“I know one family in town who say they’ll never shop in Lock Haven for as long as they live,” Holter said.

A contingent of locals went to Washington to plead their case, but the project proceeded.

Among those standing in the way was Virginia Fickes.

For 21 years, she and her late husband, Lester, had run a dairy farm started by her great-grandfather. Boats today cruise not far from where it stood.

Now 87 and living in Liberty Township, Fickes said her husband and sons checked out farms for sale elsewhere once the government made an offer.

“(The other farms) were asking for a lot more than we got, because (the government) knew you had to get out,” she said.

After rejecting the first offer and going to court, Fickes’ family accepted a slightly better deal. They lived in a borrowed camper for two winter months before moving into a new home.

Their remodeled barn and farmhouse was burned.

“We had other plans and then everything just came to a halt,” she said.

Holter hopes his book, available by calling him at 625-2640, commemorates a traumatic time.

“Many people have said I’ve written exactly how they feel about it,” he said. “It brings back memories.”

Chris Rosenblum writes about happenings in the Bald Eagle area. Send him news at crosenbl@centredaily.com or call 231-4620. And visit the Bald Eagle Area community site on CentreDaily.com for previous On Centre columns, news, photos and more.