A Brief Chronology of U.S. Government Community Relations
at the Piketon Federal Reservation

10,000 BC* Site first inhabited by Paleo-Indians as evident from the modern discovery of paleolithic projectile points. Along the north-south Great Scioto Trail, a principal animal migratory route, the site is heavily traveled by ancient Indians. The southern part of the site also falls along an important east-west line of solar equinox observation marked by numerous ancient settlements.

370 BC   Site becomes the center of the Scioto Civilization**, commonly known as Adena-Hopewell. The earliest known complex of large geometric earthworks in the Ohio Valley is built straddling Forked Tongue Creek, along the Scioto River, including two squares that are the only known prehistoric structures in the Western Hemisphere to be precisely aligned to the cardinal directions. The larger square encompasses 17 acres, about 30% larger than the base of the Great Pyramid in Egypt.

1786 AD  The American Continental Congress declares the land “vacant” and therefore seized as “Congress Lands,” open for private sale to pay national debts, despite the fact that it is densely settled and fiercely defended by the allied Shawnee and Wyandottes, who use the Scioto Trail as their principal roadway. Happening after the American Revolution but before the U.S. Constitution, the land grab falls between the legal cracks, under neither British nor U.S. governing authority.

1787   With no Indian treaty, the Ohio Company makes a bulk purchase of the land from Congress at steeply discounted price, so it can resell to speculators. The western portion, including the east bank of the Scioto River, is then transferred to a new company, the Scioto Company, so that the area most densely populated by Indians can be sold to unsuspecting foreigners.

1789The French Revolution creates a market for fraudulent land sales in Paris. Shares in the Scioto Company are sold to French buyers wanting to escape revolutionary violence, who are given no clue that “their” new land is inhabited and claimed as ancestral land by two Indian nations. Early attempts to establish a fortress settlement at Gallipolis (city of Gaul) end in disaster. The Scioto Company is later dissolved in the first major scandal of U.S. federal privatization.

1792George Washington sends 4,600 troops commanded by “Mad Anthony” Wayne to conquer the territory north of the Ohio, against the confederacy of the Shawnee chief Blue Jacket. The climactic battle comes in 1794, when the Indians take up a defensive position among huge trees felled by a massive tornado near the Maumee River – the Battle of Fallen Timbers. (DOE now claims the region is not subject to large tornadoes.)

1795By threat of continued war and false promises to respect new boundaries “guaranteeing” Indian land (Indiana), the Treaty of Greenville is signed, moving the U.S.-Indian border from the Ohio River north and westward. No compensation is paid for the land seized by treaty; token payments are made to “village chiefs” for subsequent annexations.

1799The east bank of the Scioto south of Piketon is purchased by Asa Vulgamore, who proceeds to lose various parcels at notorious poker games. Pressley Boydston, Snowden Sargent, and Adam and Unity Nye acquire large tracts, on which they establish the town of Sargents Station, with the explicit aim of assisting fugitive slaves escaping from Kentucky along the principal route of the Scioto Trail. The Sargents Methodist Episcopal Church and Bailey Chapel are later established to help the emancipation effort.

1803Ohio statehood is declared with the old Shawnee center of Chillicothe as capital. Boydston and his son-in-law, John Barnes, Jr., begin construction of the Barnes Home, overlooking the main ancient earthwork complex.

1810In one of the most famous oratorical displays of all time, Tecumseh protests to William Henry Harrison the wrongful sales of Ohio lands by “village chiefs”: “You wish to prevent the Indians from doing as we wish them, to unite and let them consider their lands as the common property of the whole. You take the tribes aside and advise them not to come into this measure…. You want, by your distinctions of Indian tribes, in allotting to each a particular, to make them war with each other…. We have endeavored to level all distinctions, to destroy village chiefs, by whom all mischiefs are done. It is they who sell the land to the Americans…. The way, the only way, to stop this evil is for the red men to unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land, as it was at first, and should be now – for it was never divided, but belongs to all…. Sell a country! Why not sell the air, the great sea, as well as the earth? Did not the Great Spirit make them all for the use of his children?”

1811The perfidious land dealings in Ohio result in the western front of the War of 1812. Tecumseh launches war against the Americans, aimed at reclaiming his boyhood home on the east bank of the Scioto. The largest Indian confederacy ever assembled, Tecumseh’s forces attack at the signal of the New Madrid earthquake, largest in history in North America, which travels along fault lines up the Ohio Valley. (DOE now claims the region is not subject to large earthquakes.)

1848Ancient Monuments of the Mississippi Valley is published and distributed to Congress, highlighting the spectacular earthwork complex at Sargents Station. Congressman Abraham Lincoln visits in December, to see the earthworks, giving him direct contact with Ohio Underground Railroad operators. Lincoln then submits his first piece of anti-slavery legislation. As President, Lincoln will name the flagship of the Civil War monitor fleet the USS Tecumseh.

1870-1944Eight rare ancient birdstones are found in Pike County, four on the Barnes estate, testifying to the former ceremonial significance of the site.

1923Piketon resident Wynn Farmer publishes a ballad about the legendary corruption and election-rigging of the Pike County Democratic machine, led by George B. Nye, descendant of Adam and Unity. (Nye served as state representative and was notoriously tried and acquitted on bribery charges.) The ballad includes the stanzas:

Oh!  It’s great to live in old Pike County,
Where they vote the year around,
In the land of election contests
Where the floating votes abound.
Where one half will sell their birthright
And the other half will buy,
Where they vote by absent ballot,
In the land of George B. Nye.

Yes, it’s fun to live in old Pike county,
Where the honest men are few,
Where the idiot and the moron
Vote, if what they say, is true.
Where the safe won’t hold the ballots—
And the keys fall from on High
In the Judge’s Ermine pocket,
In the land of George B. Nye.

But I’m proud of old Pike County,
My old home, I’ll stand by you.
And I brand these allegations,
False, malicious and untrue.
There may be a few amongst us
Who will cheat and who will lie,
But the most of us are decent,
In the land of George B. Nye.

1952With the influence of Lieutenant Governor George D. Nye, Pike County native and son of George B. Nye, the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission identifies 6,000 acres including the former Nye land in Sargents Station for a secret “A-Plant.” Supporting local residents, the Ohio Archaeological and Historical Society and the U.S. Park Service form an emergency committee to protect the unique wildlife and archaeological resources threatened by the project. Prominent Ohio naturalist Edward Thomas states on behalf of the committee: "The area is going to be spoiled and future generations have a right to know what was there. It's a distinctive habitat for plant and animal life from that of surrounding hills." The AEC refuses Thomas’s request for a biological survey but agrees to allow salvage archaeologists to monitor plant construction. After announcing this to the press, with articles ballyhooing the accommodation between “the Stone Age and the Atomic Age,” AEC reneges on the agreement and bars archaeologists from the site, again under pressure from Nye (if you want anything done in Pike County, you have to D. Nye it). Lt. Governor Nye knows that the abundance of archaeological treasures would result in construction delays. 3,700 acres, mostly from the former Barnes and Sargent estates, are purchased by the federal government for construction of the Portsmouth Area Gaseous Diffusion Plant.

1954-1990Radioactive gasses, fluorides, and hexavalent chromium are vented to the atmosphere, mostly at night with venting monitors shut off. PCB-contaminated oil, trichloroethylene, and nickel carbonyl are dumped in massive quantities on the south and east sides of the reservation near Little Beaver Creek and Big Run Creek. The venting and dumping are conducted with no outside regulation or notification to surrounding residents. The full extent of venting and dumping remains unknown.
 
1963With no American Indian consultation, on the centennial of the christening of the Civil War monitor, the U.S. Navy commissions another USS Tecumseh, this one a nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine. All of the enriched uranium for the vessel’s fuel and weapons comes from Piketon, the land that Tecumseh fought so bitterly to keep from falling into U.S. government hands.

1966The National Historic Preservation Act is enacted, followed by a series of companion preservation laws, together requiring the survey, inventory, protection and repatriation of archaeological resources on federal land or impacted by federal projects, and consultation with historic property owners and Indian tribes. To date, neither AEC nor its successor DOE takes any meaningful step to comply with these acts at Piketon.

1972The Federal Advisory Committee Act is passed, containing provisions to establish federal advisory boards free of conflicts of interest. Over the next three decades, the Department of Energy establishes numerous Site-Specific Advisory Boards chartered under FACA to mediate community relations at its major sites around the country. Piketon is the only major site to not get an SSAB or equivalent, despite constant pressure from the community.

1978The contaminated INCO Nickel Plant in Huntington, West Virginia, is secretly disassembled and transported to Piketon for burial on the south side of the reservation, with no governmental or public oversight. No Environmental Impact Statement is filed on the project. Plant managers then deny that the burial happened. (Documents released under the Freedom of Information Act prove it did.) An outdoor cylinder rupture results in the release of over seven tons of uranium to the air and drainage ditches. Local residents are told that all material was contained within the plant site, though this statement is patently false.

1978Construction begins on DOE’s Gas Centrifuge Enrichment Plant. To support the planned facility, a few dozen acres of additional land in the immediate vicinity of the Scioto earthworks are acquired for water wells, and the headwaters of the north fork of Forked Tongue Creek are obliterated. There is no compliance with NEPA or NHPA for this work. GCEP is abandoned after destroying the land in 1985.

1979The Archaeological Resources Protection Act is passed. To avoid the necessity of complying with the strict new act, DOE contractors covertly destroy a large Indian burial mound on the border between the DOE reservation and the remaining private portion of the Barnes estate, then owned by County Commissioner Eddie West. West files a lawsuit against DOE related to the work, which is settled out of court for an undisclosed amount.

1980The National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health is allowed to begin a study of Piketon workers, the first time that any outside government agency is permitted to encroach on the atomic agency’s jurisdiction. The incoming Reagan Administration, however, severely restricts the NIOSH study and ends the experiment with outside regulation.

1981The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA) is enacted, commonly known as Superfund. Though the Piketon site meets all the criteria of the Superfund legislation because of extensive prior toxic dumping, DOE begins negotiations with the State of Ohio and USEPA to exempt the Piketon site. Since formal CERCLA compliance for Piketon is never initiated, the provisions of CERCLA that require stakeholder involvement in federal cleanup projects are not implemented.

1983 Efforts by the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union to negotiate with DOE over cleanup and conversion planning at the site are rebuffed. Instead, DOE initiates an in-house end-use planning process with no stakeholder involvement. A “Waste Heat Utilization” project for the gaseous diffusion plant is initiated, resulting in millions of dollars in payments to contractors and selected local “partners,” but no actual waste heat utilization ever materializes.

1989The State of Ohio, USEPA and DOE sign a consent decree giving the state and USEPA some authority over cleanup at Piketon. OEPA begins pressuring DOE to implement some kind of stakeholder oversight committee in compliance with CERCLA. To date, DOE takes no action.

1993President Clinton issues a Directive on Environmental Justice, prohibiting federal agencies from siting hazardous industries in minority or low-income communities. Despite the fact that Piketon has a poverty rate among the highest in Ohio, to date DOE fails to identify Piketon as a community meeting environmental justice criteria.

1995 On the model of the scandal-plagued Waste Heat Utilization Project, the Southern Ohio Diversification Initiative is founded with $15 million from the Department of Energy. SODI claims to “represent stakeholders” and be “a community partner” at Piketon, though it is registered as a private development corporation, immune to sunshine laws, with closed meetings and minutes. Its board of village chiefs is self-selecting and controlled by hereditary descendants of the Nye political machine, aka “the Waverly Junta” or “the Boys.”

1998Shares of the United States Enrichment Corporation are sold by the U.S. government at auction, in a move rumored to make dozens of congressional spouses into millionaires virtually overnight. Arguably it is the largest and most corrupt privatization of federal assets since the congressional land transfers to the Ohio Company and Scioto Company in the 18th century. The resulting private USEC Inc. is given leasing rights at the Piketon site with virtually no federal regulation or community oversight.

2000 In local and congressional hearings on worker health at Piketon, it is revealed that workers were often instructed to disable monitoring systems and to not report illegal venting and dumping of toxic agents. Congress creates a compensation program for workers on the basis of this evidence, yet no advisory board or oversight mechanism is implemented for community residents.

2001The Portsmouth Area Gaseous Diffusion Plant is shut down, which ought to place the facility into immediate status for Decontamination and Decommissioning. Instead, the plant is placed in “standby” status so that USEC can continue to collect contract fees for its “operation,” while DOE postpones cleanup expenses. CERCLA provisions for stakeholder oversight are again neglected. USEC pays $2 million to SODI to plan for the site’s redevelopment. DOE and USEC maintain the fiction of standby status for six years, while USEC searches for a way to convert the gaseous diffusion site to a use that is profitable for the company.

2004USEC purchases NAC International, a company that specializes in the storage of high-level nuclear waste. Covert preparations begin to turn the Piketon site into the world’s largest high-level nuclear waste storage depot. The idea is hatched to use the buildings of the gaseous diffusion plant as storage hangars for spent nuclear fuel imported from all over the country.

2006The Bush Administration launches its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership program, incorporating the plan to store spent nuclear fuel at Piketon as part of an “integrated” waste management scheme. SODI partners with the private firm EPIFNI, headed by an ex-USEC board member, to form another private company, SONIC – the Southern Ohio Nuclear Integration Cooperative. SODI/SONIC conducts closed meetings with village chiefs “to explore what was needed to position the community for continued investment in advanced nuclear technology." [Draft SONIC GNEP Application.]  The result of these meetings, at which no community stakeholders are included, is described in SONIC documents as “local community support to host interim storage of SNF at the Portsmouth site.” When the public actually learns of the proposal over the summer, Southern Ohio Neighbors Group forms in opposition. Asked why Congresswoman Jean Schmidt supported the waste proposal without informing her constituents, her chief of staff, Barry Bennett, asserts to Associated Press: “the community is already comfortable with having nuclear material in its backyard.”

2006Speaking at a public meeting in Piketon, the manager of the DOE operations office with jurisdiction over Piketon, Bill Murphie, states: “There are no archaeological resources on federal land [at Piketon].” The statement stuns Indian artifact specialists at the meeting.

2006 Ohio EPA releases a Stream Study concluding that all five studied waterways around the Piketon DOE reservation are in recovery from massive PCB contamination from past dumping at the site. Despite the finding, neither DOE nor any other federal or state agency follows up with investigation of the impacts on human or animal health.

2006 SONG circulates a petition to bar all high-level nuclear waste from the Piketon site, and to form a Citizens Advisory Board, chartered under FACA, immediately. The petition is signed by over 5,000 area residents.

2007 Over 300 outraged local residents turn out at the Piketon GNEP field hearing. SONIC is given $670,000 to conduct a GNEP “siting study,” but 52% of the funds are inexplicably given to AREVA, the national nuclear company of France. AREVA then expresses interest in taking control of the site for an undisclosed project. GNEP unravels in the face of scientific and congressional skepticism, with funding levels slashed and DOE siting plans postponed, yet Piketon is retained on the GNEP candidate list for reasons that remain unexplained.

2007 DOE announces that a highly radioactive radium source is “missing” from the plant. Public statements discount the possibility of theft, however the Department of Defense is brought in to investigate the loss. No explanation is given to local residents as to why DOD is involved if theft is not a possibility. Elaborate arguments are put forward to absolve USEC from responsibility, though the case remains unsolved to date.

2007 In order to make the site available for GNEP development, DOE is forced to transfer the gaseous diffusion plant from standby to shutdown status. Since the CERCLA requirements for stakeholder involvement can no longer be avoided, DOE holds brief meetings with selected community groups; no area churches or American Indian tribes are included. DOE does not disclose that SODI has already prepared to organize a “community advisory committee,” through another round of closed meetings with village chiefs. DOE retains the Perspectives Group to consult on the stakeholder representation process. But when DOE’s consultants agree with the community groups that SODI cannot organize the effort without violating FACA’s protections against conflict of interest, the consultants report is buried and no action is taken by year’s end.

2007 Pike County corruption again makes the news as the Columbus Dispatch reports that more than a third of DUI cases in Waverly (nearly 100 drunk drivers) were dismissed without charges after perpetrators made $1000 “voluntary” donations to the Waverly Police Department.

2007 SODI conducts another set of secret meetings with the same village chiefs, excluding community groups, area churches, and American Indian groups, to rally support for its own model of a “Portsmouth Stakeholders Advisory Committee” that would substitute for a FACA-chartered Citizens Advisory Board.

2007 Congress ends the year by instructing DOE to consider communities that have “volunteered” for GNEP, including Piketon, as available hosts for the centralized storage of spent nuclear fuel.

2008 SODI launches a media campaign to rally support for its “Stakeholder Advisory Committee,” but fails to tell reporters of the Perspectives Group report that specifically recommends against a SODI-led advisory committee.


“You may fool all the people some of the time; you can even fool some of the people all the time; but you can’t fool all of the people all the time.”

-- quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln
       date and place of its first utterance is unknown
   (possibly a premonition on his visit to Pike County)

Chronology compiled by Geoffrey Sea for the Southern Ohio Neighbors Group