BLOOMINGTON, Ind. (AP) - Richard and Sharon Elgar had already settled on an Arlington Road farm on the edge of Bloomington when talk of constructing four-lane Ind. 37 and the Ind. 45/46 Bypass began to gel in the mid-1960s. They had refurbished an old house and were raising their first child.
“I didn’t know anything about the plans, because nothing had hit the newspaper about it,” Richard Elgar told The Herald-Times (https://bit.ly/1rk1KnQ ).
They soon built a new brick house on That Road, just off Ind. 37, and rented out the farmhouse.
“It was just about 30 days after we moved when it hit the paper, the maps (showing where the two highways were being rerouted). I got to looking as my wife prepared the evening meal, and I said, ’I think the highway is coming through our backyard. And I believe it is getting the Arlington Road house, too.”
He was right. The Elgars lost both houses and their farmland to the construction. “Previous to that, all of your highway traffic and semis came through town across the Bloomington square,” he said, recalling the old route of Ind. 37. “It was a two-way street on Walnut, and things got backed up and crowded sometimes.”
They moved from the That Road house in the early 1970s. Their children by then were old enough to start participating in 4-H, so the family bought a 118-acre farm on Breeden Road, about a mile off Ind. 45. Two decades later, they built a house on Big Sky Road off Ind. 37, near That Road. “You could look out the window and see where that first house was,” he said.
What they thought would be their last house wasn’t. A few years ago, the Elgars realized Interstate 69 was headed their way. They sold 30 acres to the state and moved - again. They were hauling furniture out of the Big Sky Road house as carpet was being installed in the new one on Ornamental Drive in the Dogwood Estates subdivision on Bloomington’s south side.
Elgar said his son-in-law joked when they decided to build their latest house two years ago that a highway might not be far behind. “I never gave it much thought, but other people have mentioned I’m like a magnet for highways,” he said.
The Elgars also bought 35 acres of a farm with their son off Lodge Road, where his plans to build a house on a quiet hill are in doubt because I-69 will come within 150 yards of the land.
Elgar does not fret about the forced relocations. He said he and his wife are blessed with a nice home with a three-car garage to store his early-20th-century Fords.
“We’ve never been bitter about it, because we know highways have to be, something necessary,” he said. “You do not want them in your backyard. But they have to be in someone’s.”
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