61 Hometown
1
My hometown is Vevay, Indiana,
And what memories that place triggers,
You could smell the Seagram’s Seven plant,
Thirty miles up the river.
2
But those memories are too easy,
And probably all wrong,
Let’s only go back twenty years,
Which isn’t all that long.
3
The year was 2000,
On a Naval Ammunition Installation,
Deeded in 1941,
From the Public Works Administration.
4
A hundred square miles of land,
Of towns and farms is what they had,
But in 1934 the New Deal took it all away,
Because the land was bad.
5
In the middle of this tract of land,
Was a hometown called Johnson Station,
From which the farmers shipped their crops,
To the rest of a struggling nation.
6
But the farmers had a money crop,
And it’s where the problem lies,
The woodsmen had cut most of the trees,
Selling them as railroad ties.
7
So if your hometown was near a railroad track,
And your memories are long,
Of selling railroad ties from the land you loved,
And Johnson Station is long gone.