Morgan Place is the lone remaining work camp for the men who built the Miami Valley Conservancy flood-control dams. Some of the temporary housing for workers and their families still survive after eight decades. The general store, the dining hall, the medical clinic, the community building, the 25-bed bunk houses for the single men are gone, rotted away or burned down.
When Cecil Morgan and his wife, Lora, arrived in the early 1960s, many of the workers or their families still lived in the houses. Like many of the longtime residents, the Morgans hailed from Kentucky.
Over the years, the Morgans gutted and renovated the house they “bought for a song,” adding on as their family grew. They continued the tradition of the families before them. In some cases, the earliest residents jacked up the temporary houses to dig out a basement, poured a real foundation and jacked the house down on it. Others used dam construction storage bunkers, with its 18-inch concrete walls as foundations, and built their houses on them.
“It’s a very different little neighborhood,” said Judy Sullivan of Washington, D.C., by phone. “The saying was, ‘Scratch anybody and you’ll find a briar.’”
Last summer, Sullivan and her sister, former Montgomery County commissioner and recorder Vicki Pegg, came back to Morgan Place. It was Sullivan’s first trip back to their neighborhood in more than half-a-century.
“Everything was the same, the houses were the same,” Sullivan said, ‘It took me right back to 1942. ... The names had changed, but the people were the same.”
Contact this reporter at (937) 225-2290 or dpage@DaytonDailyNews.com.
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