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Elmo Blum, 94, watched as a single excavator crushed the building.

He’d joined the lodge in 1946, after returning home from the war, and became one of its leaders.

Seeing the old building turned into rubble was “kind of a sad thing for me,� Blum said.

“But everything comes to an end,� he added. “And I guess that is what they call progress.�

The Masonic temple sat next to the Doe Run smelter, where lead was produced for more than 120 years.

That lead helped build Herculaneum — and it’s also the reason a part of Herculaneum is disappearing.

Lead-contaminated buildings, some nearly a century old, are being removed by Doe Run, .

The day after the Masonic temple was demolished, wreckers came for the long-shuttered Assumption Catholic School.

Earlier casualties included a church and city library. And City Hall eventually could be moved, although that’s unlikely to happen for quite a while.

Losing pieces of their history isn’t the only challenge facing the town’s 3,800 residents.

Since 1892, when Doe Run’s predecessor, the St. Joseph Lead Co., started production in Herculaneum, the smelter has been a core part of the town’s identity, providing jobs and tax revenue.

Before the town had a water system, people took baths in the plant’s change room. The company built many of the original frame and stucco homes for workers and their families. Company carpenters did house repairs for residents.

Just a few blocks away from the 550-foot smokestack that towers over the town, brothers Randy and Larry Hill, ages 66 and 74, walked to Assumption school. It was definitely a company town in those days, they say.

They remember the town being so dark from plant smoke that cars would turn on their headlights at noon, and the sound of factory whistles blowing to signal shift changes and call for the fire department.

As adults, they lived just a few houses away from each other in an area known as the “buyout zone,� a three-eighths of a mile swath around the facility where most residents, including the Hills, have sold their homes to Doe Run since 2002.

Assumption school, where the Hills and their future wives attended, closed well before then — in 1966.

“It’s coming after all of us were in the buyout, so it’s coming after our families have all moved. I think the big one for me was the church because I’d gone there my whole life,� said Joan Hill, Randy’s wife.

For years, one room held grades one through four. The other was for grades five through eight. Another room in the basement was added.

They have fond memories of the school. Randy Hill says he was sent home for carrying Jim Bates, his future brother-in-law, on his shoulders after being warned by a priest to knock it off. They had doughnuts and hot chocolate on the first Friday of the month. It’s where the nuns pulled out a TV to watch coverage after John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

The Hills say they loved growing up in Herculaneum, where they played on the slag pile and along the river.

They say they suffer no ill effects from lead exposure, although Randy Hill said his blood did test high for lead during quarterly tests at Doe Run when he worked there as a pipe fitter.

Cleaning up

It was lead exposure to Herculaneum’s residents that eventually spelled the end for the smelter.

Doe Run, when it announced it would close the smelter, blamed tightened federal air-quality standards, which it characterized as the most restrictive in the world.

The new standard is 10 times more stringent than the old, dropping to 0.15 micrograms from 1.5 micrograms of lead per cubic meter of air, and was prompted by a lawsuit filed by Herculaneum residents Jack and Leslie Warden.

Doe Run did at times meet the old 1.5 standard, including for 30 months in a row ending in 2004. But it never met the 0.15 level while the smelter was operating, the company has said.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency offered a different take on Doe Run’s decision to close, saying the company “� to shut down the smelter instead of installing pollution control technologies needed to reduce sulfur dioxide and lead emissions as required by the Clean Air Act.

“This area had the highest levels of lead in the country by far, and all of that went somewhere, and lead doesn’t travel far. It settled in the community and was part of people’s homes and buildings and schools,� said Maxine Lipeles, director of Washington University’s Interdisciplinary Environmental Clinic who worked with Herculaneum residents affected by lead.

When new air-quality standards for lead were made public in 2008, Jefferson County was one of two places in the nation that fell short of the old standard. The EPA identified Doe Run as the primary local source of that pollutant.

Since the smelter stopped operating, lead air concentrations in Herculaneum generally have decreased, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources has found. But there have been “occasional elevated monitored concentrations� that could be attributable to remediation activities at the facility.

Most recent readings at air monitors around Herculaneum have fallen well below the 0.15 threshold, although the monitor at City Hall showed the average lead concentration for the last three months of 2017, , was 0.22.

Lead is a neurotoxin that interrupts normal brain development and has been linked to behavioral problems in children. Adults can tolerate higher levels of lead than children but also can suffer health problems.

Doe Run has spent millions of dollars cleaning up Herculaneum, including replacing the soil in 781 yards at a cost of more than $14 million before smelting ceased. Required soil testing was completed in 2014, the company said, and additional yards were remediated in 2015 based on that sampling.

The company expects to resume spending on yard cleanups after the smelter site is remediated, sometime after 2021.

The DNR said last week that total remediation may take several years, and that Doe Run’s cleanup beyond buildings and soil includes monitoring the groundwater beneath the facility, stabilizing the south slag pile and “addressing impacted wetlands.�

The land around Doe Run is largely vacant and fenced off with signs warning people to stay away because of lead contamination.

“I’m sure it affects the fabric of a community when buildings are removed,� said Lipeles, who said she didn’t speak from a scientific perspective. “It also removes structures that had a good chance of having significant amounts of lead in them just by being where they are.�

Financial hit

City Administrator Jim Kasten, 69, and Mayor Bill Haggard, 66, grew up in Herculaneum and remember when the town was centered around the smelter.

Back then, it felt like a company town, they said. It stopped feeling that way after Doe Run broke the Teamsters union following a 2½-year strike that ended in 1994.

A business-lined Main Street next to Doe Run was gone by the end of the 1990s. Now, they estimate two-thirds of the town’s residents live west of Interstate 55 in growing subdivisions.

Doe Run has pared down its operations in Herculaneum, where it continues to operate a refinery making alloys and employing about 30 people — but eventually it will move that operation to its facility in Boss, Mo., in Dent County.

Its contribution to the local tax base has shriveled, a hit felt especially hard by the Dunklin School District. Doe Run’s assessed valuation has fallen from about $13.9 million in 2008 — about 9 percent of the school district’s total assessed valuation — to about $2.7 million in 2016, or 1.79 percent of its total, district figures show.

In 2017, the city of Herculaneum got almost $19,800 in property taxes from Doe Run, according to the Jefferson County assessor’s office. That amount was more than $57,000 in 2013, the last year of smelting.

“We’re just treading water — that’s where we are with the budget. Any big thing, and we’ll be deficit spending,� Kasten said.

Doe Run, while smelting, had bought a large portion of the water the city is contracted to buy. Because it no longer buys as much water, residents’ water bills have increased by about a third and sewer rates by about 20 percent, he said.

The Dunklin School District, which serves children from Herculaneum and Pevely, saw taxes contributed by Doe Run drop from $383,000 in 2013 to roughly $127,000 last year, according to county assessor figures.

“We’ve been able to maintain programs for the most part. And ‘maintain’ would be a good word, because we haven’t been able to add programs,� said Superintendent Stan Stratton.

The school district rolled up its tax rate under the terms of the Hancock Amendment to cover some of the hit. But voters rejected a property-tax hike in 2016 that would have paid for $13 million in projects including adding classrooms at Pevely Elementary School so students could be moved out of modular classrooms. And the district only can offer a $34,200 starting salary to new teachers, which makes it hard to attract and retain them.

There once was a time when school and city officials could call the Doe Run plant manager and ask for money for extra projects, such as sponsoring a speaker from out of town or paying someone to supervise a school fitness room so people in town could exercise in the evenings.

Those days are gone.

Staying put

In Herculaneum, about 56 buildings have been removed in last four years, which are in addition to the roughly 140 homes before that, according to Doe Run.

But while others are leaving the part of town near the factory, the 110-year-old Buren Chapel African Methodist Episcopal church on Burris Street is deepening its roots and raising money to expand.

Church leaders are raising $100,000 for renovations that include adding meeting space and restrooms on the first floor, said its pastor, the Rev. Martinous Walls.

“We decided to stay in the area even though we knew Doe Run had run its course there. But our church still has a future there,� Walls said.

The roughly 70 members use the nearby one-room schoolhouse that housed Douglas Elementary School, where the black children of Herculaneum went before integration and is still owned by the Dunklin School District and leased to the church, for barbecues and other fellowship.

Several generations of four families are largely responsible for keeping the church strong through the decades, Walls said, and the church decided against a move to Festus a couple years ago.

“I still feel like the spirit of the church where I grew up is still there,� said member Linda Rockmore, 67. Growing up, she said it was the center of the black community in Herculaneum — and that in many ways, it still is.

Her mother sold her house that was in the buyout zone but stayed in town.

“A lot of people didn’t want to leave here, especially the older people,� Rockmore said.

The church has raised $31,000 toward its fundraising goal.

What’s next

A parcel in the eastern part of the property between its buildings and the river bank has taken on a new purpose as a Mississippi River port, which began operating in 2013.

Riverview Commerce Park drafted plans and conducted the cleanup for that site, according to the DNR. The agency said it and the EPA approved of the project because it would “rapidly remediate exposed lead-contaminated ground and bring economic development to the site.�

Doe Run is still looking for a buyer for its plant. A ceramics company was interested in it a few years ago, but went to Kentucky, said Chris Neaville, Doe Run’s asset development director.

“I think the most interest we’ve seen is in ports and transportation,â€� he said. “The property has great rail assets, barge-loading capacity that’s hard to find between ºüÀêÊÓƵ and Memphis, and it’s close to the interstate.â€�

The tanks, bag houses, a few storage buildings and the rail unloader facility have been removed from the Herculaneum facility’s property. The sinter plant and blast furnace are slated to come down before the end of this year.

A maintenance shop, warehouse and office buildings will stay on the property in hopes they can be used by a buyer. So will the smokestack.

“We consider it an asset for the property,� Neaville said.

City leaders are hopeful the port will continue to expand. They’re going to keep fighting for their town, and celebrating it.

They’re organizing a to celebrate 100 years of the Herculaneum High School — the first class to attend four years of high school graduated in 1919 — complete with an alumni parade.

Said Kasten, the city administrator who is also the school’s cross-country coach: “We have not quit celebrating life in Herculaneum.�