About 44 years ago, Martha Ervin could look outside the back window of her new house and see gardens, neighborhood kids playing and family friends enjoying the weather. Now, she sees a 10-foot chain-link fence separating her one-story house from cranes, bulldozers, concrete and dirt.
Ervin's quiet residential area has been swallowed by Ball State University, and her house at 1416 Neely Ave. is the last one standing. Ball State bought Ervin's house - along with those of her five neighbors on the block and at least a dozen others behind her on Marsh Street, just west of New York Avenue - to build North Hall, a $35.6 million residence hall that will house about 600 students in August 2010.
Ervin, 88, said she didn't like to think about how she's alone on her block, with the Amelia T. Wood Student Health Center to the west and construction to the east.
"That's progress - that's what they keep telling me - and it gives me indigestion," she said. "Being the last leaf on the tree is kind of overwhelming."
But even that leaf will fall, as Ervin is packing her belongings to move next month with her 13-year-old cat, Beau, to a retirement community in Muncie. While her neighbors' houses were demolished in March, she and the university reached a deal that allowed her to sell the property to Ball State in the fall of 2007 and lease it until this August, Jim Lowe, director of engineering and operations, said. The house will be gone by mid-August, he said.
Ervin moved into the house in 1964 with her husband, Ben, and two kids, John and Mark. The house across the street from residence halls for the then-called Ball State Teacher's College was ideal for the family, she said, as Ben Ervin was assistant dean of the graduate school and director of curricular advising between 1957 and 1986.
Mark Ervin, now an attorney, said he remembered Robert Kennedy's 1968 visit to Ball State, on the day Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. Ervin said he could see Kennedy ride by in an open car along Neely Avenue, just outside of the Ervin house.
Ben and Martha Ervin were students of the Teacher's College in the 1940s, a time when Lucina Hall was a residence hall, the Administration Building was the center of social activity and campus stretched between University and Riverside avenues. In fact, they knew many of the professors campus halls are now named after, including Mark Studebaker, Robert LaFollette and Sharley DeMotte.
When they moved into the Neely house, Martha Ervin said she expected the university to expand to the south, instead of northward to her property. She said she had no inkling Ball State would someday buy her house.
"What they're building now is beyond my comprehension," she said. "I think they ought to take time out to smell the roses. But, now I have time to smell them, and I don't like it."
Mark Ervin said the negotiations between the university and the family were done with mutual respect. Ball State paid $127,050 for the house. In 2007, Delaware County assessed the house at $134,600. But Martha Ervin won't be smelling the roses anymore, with construction creeping closer to her backyard. But at least the noise doesn't bother her too much. "It's a blessing to be hard of hearing," she said. "That's why I've lived here so comfortably, I suppose."
And after nearly half a century, Ervin will look out her window to a flourishing college campus for the last time.
"We have to be realistic; at my age, maybe the timing was right," she said, "but I won't lose contact with Ball State."
This story was written in conjunction with NewsLink Indiana.
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