Nonprofit feeds 5,000 in Ohio town of 12,000 after layoffs (DHL closing)

[Liberal_in_LA]

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/02/20/feed.hungry.ohio/index.html

Nonprofit feeds 5,000 in Ohio town after layoffs

By Faith Karimi and Robyn Sidersky
CNN

(CNN) -- Cheryl Bradshaw shivered under a big brown coat as she made her way through a line of people waiting along an icy road in Wilmington, Ohio. She was among about 5,000 residents who accepted food from the nonprofit Feed the Children.

The nonprofit Feed the Children delivers boxes of food and other items to families Thursday in Wilmington, Ohio.

"A lot of this people in this town ... it's day to day, dollar to dollar," Bradshaw said of the town of about 12,000 between Cincinnati and Columbus.

Wilmington is still reeling from news that delivery giant DHL would close its hub there. About 3,000 of the 8,000 people who faced layoffs lived in or around Wilmington.

One in three families in Wilmington had someone employed at DHL, according to an economic task force created by Mayor David Raizk.

A crowd gathered Thursday as 12 loaded semitrailers cautiously parked on slippery roads. Each family got two boxes. One had 25 pounds of canned food and vegetables. Another contained 10 pounds of personal care items.

[Blue_In_AK]

1. This is the town in which I was born

and where my ancestors lived all the way back to the 19th Century. In fact, I believe we have Bradshaws in our family tree. This makes me very sad.

[Liberal_in_LA]

2. It's a shame.

:cry:

[Blue_In_AK]

3. It does really break my heart.

I haven't been back there in decades, so I don't know the "lay of the land" these days, but when I was a little girl, Wilmington was the hub town for all the surrounding family farms in Clinton County. I was never aware of any factory farming or anything in Southern Ohio in the early '50s. Did it even exist?

Both sets of my grandparents had farms right next to each other -- I don't know how large, maybe 80 or 160 acres. We had a farm not too far away with corn, a great garden, a cow or two, chickens, rabbits. We didn't have indoor plumbing, but having never had it, we didn't miss it. Bathrooms and running water were kind of a novelty. Only my paternal grandparents and my mother's oldest sister had bathrooms.

Most of my aunts and uncles on my mother's side (she had 8 brothers and sisters) lived on farms either in Clinton County or down around Hillsboro. My dad's sister lived in town - her husband had some sort of machine shop, and my Uncle John also had a farm in the area.

When we went to church, it was to the Quaker Church in Gurneyville that had a graveyard behind it. I remember the stained glass windows and my stern grandmother next to me on the wooden pew. There were fields of grain and grass, trilliums and sponge mushrooms, fruit trees, fresh vegetables, home-grown meat, forests, little creeks where we'd swim. My family on both sides had been living there for a hundred years at least - the ancestral houses were still occupied by great aunts and uncles.

Wilmington is where we went when we went to "town." For us farm kids it was the big city.

I'm sure it's not anything like that anymore, and you can never go back, but I know the heart of that place, and this is making me cry. It's the death of a culture.