Longtime Fowler resident loses ground to highway

Six homes were demolished to make room for the interchange.
By STEPHEN SIFF
VINDICATOR STAFF WRITER
FOWLER -- One of the on-ramps at the King Graves Road interchange follows an extraordinary long, looping path down to state Route 11, tracing an oblong moat around a small, dilapidated graveyard.
Gravestones, some dating to the early 1800s, are arranged in irregular rows behind Doud Cemetery's split rail fence. A few of the stones have toppled with time, but new American flags flutter by two others.
The new interchange was engineered to spare the dead at Doud Cemetery, but the Ohio Department of Transportation is less kind to the living.
Demolition: Six homes were demolished to make room for the interchange, said John Davis, who has lived near the site long enough to know. One of the homes was his, purchased along with 54 acres of farmland in 1947, after he returned from service in World War II.
"When you deal with the government, there is no such thing as a good deal," he said, still sitting astride the mower he uses to cut the grass around the remaining garage and pole barn. "They are going to get what they want, one way or another."
It is not the first time the government got what it wanted from John Davis.
When Route 11 was built, the state took 11 acres, and left another 14 or 15 landlocked on the other side of the divided highway, Davis said. An 8-foot deep drainage ditch from the Youngstown Air Force Reserve Station cuts behind the back of his garage, hampering access to what were once fields. His house was demolished earlier this year.
"It was a 175-year-old home and they tore it down like it was a shack," said Davis, fiddling with keys to his tractor. He dresses like the city-dweller he has been forced to become, wearing sneakers and slacks, a black cap shading his gaunt features. He wears an angel pin on his jacket lapel, a reminder of his days flying small aircraft.
"If you have something you don't want to sell and they buy it anyway -- it is not the American way," he said.
The house is gone now, but Davis is at his property every day to feed the cats in the barn and check on the old cars in the garage. He mows the lawn a couple of times per week, ODOT employees at the site say.
"He is pretty old," said Jim Wolcott, an ODOT inspector. "He has seen a lot of progress around here."