Mike Williams is about the last one standing in The Flats, a fascinating piece of Cedar Rapids history

CEDAR RAPIDS - The last vestige of a neighborhood that dates back to before the Civil War is fading away here with barely a notice.

Mike Williams is watching, though.

A sign on the front of Williams' once-flood-wrecked and now-newly-rebuild home reads “Last House Standing.”

The 59-year-old Williams, who has run a one-man private-investigator service and now is a concrete-company mechanic and dump-truck driver, came to live at 1713 10th St. SE in the out-of-the-way neighborhood known as The Flats some 21 years ago.

Back then, the neighborhood featured 150 or more houses, two taverns and a former grocery store, all or nearly all of which dated back to the 19th Century. That fact of age, says Cedar Rapids historian Mark Stoffer Hunter, made The Flats the oldest collection of homes in the city.

At the same time, the modest nature and a general decline of the houses made them the lowest in value in the city. Williams' 600-square-foot, story-and-a-half house had been valued at $25,055 before the June 2008 flood. Now, with nearly everything around him destroyed by the 2008 disaster, his rebuilt house is valued at $11,905. He says his property-tax bill is $16 a year.

Local historian Stoffer Hunter says a first wave of immigrants, mostly from Bohemia, put up about a dozen houses in The Flats in 1852 and 1853. At the time, the area was outside the limits of Cedar Rapids, which had incorporated in 1849, but nicely placed along the Cedar River and a short walk to town.

“Everything changed,” Stoffer Hunter says, when the Sinclair packing plant opened in 1872 right next to the Flats and the neighborhood began to fill in with houses. In the city map of 1895, about 150 homes were in place, and the neighborhood's boundaries defined - by the meatpacking plant, the river, railroad tracks and a Chicago North Western Railroad roundhouse.

By the early 1960s, the Cargill grain-processing plant had taken over the railroad roundhouse property, and in more recent years, Cargill begin a march to gobble up houses as its need for room grew.

The company ran into Williams about a decade ago, though, when he emerged as the neighborhood leader to object to what seemed to him was Cargill's plan to erase The Flats from the map.

In an agreement with the city, Cargill and the neighborhood, Cargill built a privacy fence and an attractive park-like buffer along 10th Street SE between one of the entrances to the plant and the neighborhood.

Williams' small house sat right across 10th Street SE from the plant gate, in place to keep an eye on matters.

The Flats, the name of which implies a long history of periodic flooding, interestingly, had gone untouched by floodwaters for most of its life because of a levee built by the meatpacking plant right next door.

But the historic June 2008 flood got to the houses, all-but burying Williams' house in 15 feet of water and nearly all of the neighboring houses, too. The Cargill plant was hit hard as well.

In the first days after the water receded, Williams decided to give up on The Flats. But then he changed his mind. The house's historic status allowed him to secure a building permit to bring the place back to life, even though its damage was classified as “beyond reasonable repair” and it sits in the 100-year flood plain.

From February 2009 to July 2009, Williams lived in a recreational vehicle on his property as he worked long hours on the house. He puts the costs at about $60,000, half of which came from government disaster funds and half from his savings.

No one would have noticed except that Williams and the Cargill plant are disagreeing again as Cargill works to rezone property for a new parking lot.

But the dispute is something of a last gasp, with Williams all but acknowledging as much.

He has suddenly looked up, after long hours of labor and thousands of his own dollars in reconstruction costs, to see than nearly everything else of The Flats is gone. One 80-year-old neighbor is back in a tiny house, and people are living in about a half dozen houses on higher ground on the very edge of the neighborhood up by Otis Road SE. But most of the rest of what was left of the place after the flood has either been demolished or will be.

“I have to admit when I rebuilt the house, I never thought only two people would be down here,” Williams says. “You have no idea what it's like living somewhere when no one else is here.

“It isn't a neighborhood. It's like living on an island.”

Local historian Stoffer Hunter says “there is some logic to Mike's concern” about Cargill's latest plans. He notes that the city is about to demolish the flood-and-fire-damaged Sinclair plant next to The Flats, which will position the Sinclair site for redevelopment. The New Bohemia neighborhood, he adds, is not far away.

Just how far should or will the city let Cargill reach once Mike Williams is gone? Stoffer Hunter wonders.

He says it would be nice if Cargill some day would erect some historical markers to tell the story of The Flats after it vanishes from existence.

“Because Cargill is the end of The Flats' story. They're the last chapter of that,” Stoffer Hunter says.

He says there is an irony in it all, too: Those who work in the Cargill plant are the “modern-day equivalent” of the workers who lived in The Flats and worked in the packinghouse and for the railroad.