Minnesota City: First disaster, now demolition

MINNESOTA CITY, MINN. -- What the Aug. 19 flash floods started at Stan and Gerry Smith's house in Minnesota City, a 4,200-pound machine with dagger teeth finished on Wednesday.

The John Deere excavator clamped down on the roof and tugged once, twice, three times. The 150-year-old house swayed as each pull ripped away a mouthful of wood and shingle.

It was an emotion-wracked demolition. Flood waters had left the house hanging over a steeply eroded stream bank, a scene captured in photos that became iconic in the saga of August's floods.

"Oh! Oh! Oh!" cried the Smiths' granddaughter, Heather Henry, as she and other family members watched the first blow to the modest house Gerry, 77, and Stan, 81, had lived in for 45 years.

While hundreds of homes were seriously damaged, the loss of this one was difficult for the Smiths because of the family's long history there.

The Smith family fell silent, huddled in coats against a biting October wind, and watched as each crunch of the excavator exposed pink insulation and dangling wires. Each blow sent chalky dust into the air and expelled memories embraced by the close-knit family, which has spent every Christmas Eve in the three-bedroom house for 45 years.

"You have to walk sideways," granddaughter Heidi Young said of how the Smiths, their eight children, 29 grandchildren and nine (with one on the way) great-grandchildren had navigated the small house during the holiday.

For decades, Garvin Brook had quietly murmured behind the Smiths' brown-paneled house. It was known to flood, said Department of Natural Resources hydrologist Bill Huber, but its most prominent reputation was as a trout stream that meandered through southeastern Minnesota's bluff country and into the Mississippi River.

A close call

One February its icy current had nearly dragged away the Smiths' second-born, Dawn Shold, after the then-12-year-old tried to give a dead pet rabbit a "burial at sea" in the stream and fell through a hole in the ice. She grabbed onto the edge of the ice just before she was sucked under.

Even so, she and her brother, Richard Smith, had regularly waded in its waters. But early on Aug. 19, the stream swelled to uncommon heights, lapping against the Smiths' house until it swept away a large portion of their back yard, including a workshop, shed and venison-butchering shop.

"I never dreamed it would happen," said Stan Smith. "Losing our lives would've been a heck of a lot worse."

Rebuilding, slowly

Floodwaters devastated seven southeastern Minnesota counties this summer and killed seven. The counties were later declared federal disaster areas, and continue the laborious and expensive process of rebuilding.

Minnesota City Mayor Dan O'Neil, who lives down the street from the Smiths, estimated damage to the town of 235 at $3.8 million. "They're a real good family," O'Neil said of the Smiths.

He said their home was the only one in town that had to be demolished. A number of neighbors also had their back yards washed away. But unlike the Smiths' house, said their daughter Cheryl Henry, none of those houses was hanging over the embankment.

There was laughter as well as grief at Wednesday's demolition as the Smiths and four of their daughters, two grandchildren and a son-in-law reminisced about happier times.

At one point, Gerry halted the demolition as a colorful sheet of paper draped over a crumbling wall was exposed. Was it a long-lost finger painting from one of the children? A photograph? Shold and her sister Brenda Hoepner climbed upstairs, got the thing and guffawed. It was the ocean-scene backdrop to an aquarium long-banished to the attic.

'It's kind of like a death'

Stan and Gerry Smith had six children when they left a family dairy farm near Troy, Minn., and bought the Minnesota City house for $7,000.

"Even though it was tight and small, there was always room," Hoepner said. "There was always a lot of family and love. We've been here so long it's kind of like a death."

As a testimony to their bond, seven of the Smiths' children still live minutes away; one lives in Roseville. The loss of the home will be especially hard because it's also the first time that their youngest child, Michelle Smith, will not be home for Christmas Eve. She's with the Minnesota National Guard in Iraq. Her sister, Leisa Evanson, videotaped the event for her.

Gerry and Stan plan to place a modular home on their site.

As the Smiths rebuild their lives, crews contracted by the federal government are busy rebuilding the stream bank. The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Natural Resources Conservation Service is spending about three-quarters of $1 million to rebuild the destroyed back yards and strengthen the shoreline with limestone boulders, said Mark Kunz, a district conservationist.

By 2:30 p.m., the Smiths' house had been reduced to a small pile of rubble, the rest of it having been dumped in bits and pieces into five dumpsters.

"Now I feel better that it's final," Gerry Smith said as she sat in a van with two daughters. "Now we have to start over."

Chao Xiong • 612-673-4391

Chao Xiong • cxiong@startribune.com