Photo gallery: A disappearing town in the shadow of Big Coal
By Nicole Cohen
4 April 2012 Ten years ago this spring, the residents of Cheshire, Ohio, had a decision to make: They could stay in their homes and suffer the effects of pollution from a nearby coal-burning power plant; or they could let that plant’s owner buy them out and, building by building, dismantle their town. In April 2002, they chose to sell. A few weeks ago, I came across the photographs Franz Jantzen took documenting what happened next. Jantzen is a Washington, D.C.-based fine art photographer who has recently attracted attention for his work digitally assembling dozens — sometimes hundreds — of photographs into multidimensional images. But what he did in Cheshire is much more basic. After hearing about the Cheshire buyout from family in southern Ohio, Jantzen paid the town a visit. He used his view camera to capture idyllic scenes of small-town America; then he came back one year, two years, and finally seven years later to see how the town had changed. “The first visit was sort of creepy because it looked like a bucolic little town,” Jantzen says, and yet its residents were preparing to pack up and leave. “A year after my first visit — that was the strangest because the houses had not been torn down yet but everybody had moved out. … It was like a ghost town. People were tearing down the vinyl siding of their houses.” According to Pat Hemlepp, a spokesman for the plant’s owner, American Electric Power, the events leading up to the buyout started in the summer of 2001. At that time, the company installed new emissions control equipment at the plant, and blue clouds of sulfuric acid started drifting into town. “The sulfuric acid mist was an irritant,” Hemlepp tells The Picture Show in an email. “Anyone exposed to it would get an allergic-like reaction — itchy, burning eyes; scratchy throat; etc. — but the symptoms would disappear when the exposure ended.” Locals told The Associated Press that the smog also caused headaches and chemical burns. It wasn’t long before they took their complaints to American Electric Power, and eventually settled on a buyout. […]
