Intel, four years on: Most of the neighbors are gone

Four years ago this month, a bomb went off in the cornfield across Green Chapel Road from the humble farmhouse Danny and Barbara Vanhoose called home for five decades.

It wasn’t a physical bombshell, but an emotional concussion that came with much fanfare during an announcement on Jan. 21, 2022. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine and other dignitaries trumpeted that day that Intel would build what officials said would be the world’s largest computer-chip manufacturing campus in the world when the $28 billion complex would begin operating in 2025 – except that it didn’t. 

| Read more: Longtime residents of Green Chapel Road watch on TV as dignitaries christen the “Silicon Heartland” just across the road

State officials called it the centerpiece of what they quickly dubbed Ohio’s “Silicon Heartland,” one that would generate 20,000 jobs in the state, including 7,000 construction jobs and 3,000 jobs at Intel with an average salary of $135,000. And while much has happened since that upbeat news conference at the Midland Theatre in downtown Newark, financial challenges at Intel slowed construction on nearly 1,000 acres of former farmland and the company has pushed back the production start date to 2030 or 2031. 

The blast felt that day by the Vanhooses and their neighbors on Green Chapel Road, and around the corners on Clover Valley Road and Mink Street, soon leveled virtually every corn stalk and tree – mature trees that had towered over fencelines from a time when Barbara’s ancestors settled there. Heavy machines soon turned those oaks, maples and other hardwoods into steaming piles of mulch.

Barbara, who lived on the East Coast as a child, loved to gaze from the bay window of their humble, century-old farmhouse at tall corn bending and swaying in a strong breeze. It reminded her of the coast.

“I had told my husband when I was younger that corn makes me think of the ocean because when the wind blows, it goes; it ripples. I look over and I know it’s just my imagination, but I can see the mountains,” Barbara told The Reporting Project in June of 2022.

The shock waves of development washing over western Licking County also claimed all of the houses dotting the south side of Green Chapel Road between Mink and Clover Valley – a stretch of road on which, months earlier, Barbara could name every resident as she walked her little dog, Kirby, down the middle of a country road where passing cars could be counted by the hour rather than the minute. 

Danny and Barbara, both 78, raised three daughters in their dream house in the country, and they had planned to live out their days in that house. They held on as long as they could, enduring the dust and disruption – the incessant sounds of chainsaws and bulldozers and dump trucks, watching from their front porch as Green Chapel Road was transformed from a barely two-lane road to a five-lane boulevard with roundabouts and hundreds of new, little trees planted by Intel.  

| Read more: Longtime residents watch the world change from their living room window

Last week, on Jan. 9, Danny and Barbara carried a few remaining boxes full of memories from their home of 50 years and turned over the keys to a man who planned to board it up and tear it down. They bought a house 25 miles north of their old home – a house Barbara calls “that other place” – in rural Morrow County, where they hope to regain a peaceful life in the country. 

“We’re trying to stay calm about it,” Barbara said in December, “but it really has been difficult.”

It’s a story that has played out hundreds of times across 3,000 acres of Licking County farmland that is now the New Albany International Business Park, which is rapidly filling with data centers and other commercial and industrial companies.

A place called home

A retired welder, Danny spent hours on their enclosed front porch tinkering and fixing things while watching the world go by – slowly – on the country road 30 feet from their house.

He doesn’t say much, quietly listening and occasionally offering a nod or one- or two-word answers to Barbara’s questions. The couple live frugally and choose not to have a computer, relying on news collected through neighbors on their road or in places like the local library. Only in the past year did they start using a cellphone.

Barbara’s roots in Monroe Township go back three generations. They were part of a Johnstown community they said felt like family until the neighbors’ houses started falling around them.

She remembers when Green Chapel was a dirt road. Her great-grandfather helped establish Johnstown in 1813, and the road’s namesake landmark belonged to her great-grandmother’s relatives, the Greens, for whom the road is named. 

By late March of 2022, blue signs appeared, posted by The New Albany Company in yards and fields across the road from Barbara and Danny’s house, notifying them of a “zoning change,” a signal that the land and homes had been purchased and were set to be demolished. The New Albany Company had been buying land and houses for what would become Intel’s campus since at least the summer of 2021.

After the Intel announcement, The New Albany Company wasted no time clearing the land of buildings and trees to prepare for factory construction. On June 6, 2022, three demolition crews simultaneously razed three houses on Green Chapel Road, including the house directly across the road from the Vanhooses – the house they rented when they first moved to Green Chapel.

And the city of New Albany moved quickly to annex more than 1,600 acres of western Licking County to expand its existing industrial park, including the nearly 1,000 acres on which Intel would build. As a chain-link fence and 20-foot-tall earthen berm appeared around the Intel site, New Albany Police cars began patrolling the road, and suddenly, the city was upon them.

At the time, Barbara compared Intel’s development to a hurricane that blew through the community with no official notice or warning, which was a cause for pronounced frustration in the community.

“It would be nice if somebody had originally come up and down the road, perhaps telling people this was actually going to happen ahead of time,” Barbara said in 2022. “No one ever warned us. No one ever gave us any warning whatsoever.”

The Vanhoose home was filled with the kind of character that takes years to cultivate. Shelves in their living room were lined with photos of their three daughters. Coffee-table books, including some about cats, sat atop a small table, near a figurine of a sleeping cat. (Barbara loves animals.) An image of Jesus and of Catholic religious icons were on display, and their kitchen was a hodgepodge of Barbara’s vintage finds: Teacups, saucers, and porcelain figurines line the walls.

“My house was like a museum with every child in the neighborhood,” she said. “Every child wanted to come here.”

But not officials from Intel or state and local governments.

When President Joe Biden came to the Intel site in September 2022 to dedicate the site, he stood maybe 500 yards from Danny’s and Barbara’s front porch. It was a big event, but the neighbors weren’t invited.

Danny and Barbara watched on TV from across the road as the president, who had earlier called these former bountiful fields “empty acres,” said it had become a “field of dreams.”

Barbara sighed as she watched.

“My dream was to just grow old in my own home,” and live out her days here on a quiet country road, she said that day. 

“We almost made it,” Danny replied.

Moving on

Construction continued at the Intel site amid a forest of towering cranes as Danny and Barbara said goodbye last week to their home and the five wooded acres where Barbara delighted in feeding birds, rabbits, raccoons, deer and even a skunk or two. Many of them found homes in the tall trees, brush and tall grass – especially after refugees from the construction zone fled the fencelines and woods being demolished across the street.

It wasn’t an easy decision for Danny and Barbara to put a for-sale sign in the front yard. The couple said they eventually decided they couldn’t take it anymore, so they sold their property in April for $1.25 million to the Johnstown Land Company, which is an affiliate of The New Albany Company and the main developer in all of New Albany.

That’s less than some others have received for similar-sized properties in the neighborhood, and while it might seem like a big number, the Vanhooses found that it shrinks pretty fast when you’re looking for a comparable property in a red-hot housing market.

It took months to find a new place.

“We looked at a lot of places,” she said. “My husband knows a lot about buildings and taking care of things, and every time we went somewhere, he’d say, ‘That won’t be any good at all.’ Some of them needed a lot of work.”

“Our Realtor finally said, ‘How far are you willing to go?’” Barbara said. “We wanted to keep it at 25 miles,” but ended up going out farther because rural options within 25 miles were slim. “Our Realtor said, ‘I know of a place. … It has a lot of good features.’ So we went to look at it. We got lost a couple of times, but we finally found it.”

They paid about $600,000 for a seven-year-old house on five acres. But it’s not about the money, because it will never be the same, Barbara said. The houses across the road are nice enough, but they’re no replacement for her ocean of corn.

And their own new house is nice, too, she said.

“Oh, the house is beautiful,” Barbara said. “It has an open floor plan with a bamboo floor, two full baths and a half bath, three bedrooms and Amish-made cabinets that close themselves.”

But it lacks the character of their old place, and she wonders if it will ever feel like home – especially considering that they don’t know anyone in their new neighborhood and they’ll need to find a new grocery store and a host of other services, or drive 35 miles back “home” for some of those things.

It’s an adventure, but not one they wanted this late in life. And it has taken a toll.

“During the past year, my doctor said I had too much stress in my life. It all comes from over there,” Barbara said, pointing toward the construction cranes and what will become the front door to the Intel campus.

Danny is a stoic man, but he is clearly affected by all that has happened around them and to them in the past four years. He and Barbara said they try not to think too much about what will happen to their old home.

“They’ll bring in a trackhoe and tear it down,” Danny said. “They tear them all down.”

Alan Miller writes for TheReportingProject.org, the nonprofit news organization of Denison University’s Journalism program, which is supported by generous donations from readers. Sign up for The Reporting Project newsletter here.