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Dear Editor,
As part of the reconstruction of County Highway T between H and Barneveld, the Iowa County Highway Department is determined to destroy any access to the historic Hyde Chapel near Mills Road. ICHD is actually ignoring and running roughshod over the legal protection provided the Hyde Chapel and contiguous Hyde Cemetery through their deeds! (And viable construction options exist) If ICHD succeeds with this transgression, no more charming weddings at the pristine, attractive Civil War era Hyde Chapel that is on the prestigious National Register of Historic Places and is the best church example of Georgian architecture surviving in Iowa County. Drive by the Hyde Chapel and check out the stakes driven into the hillside in front of the Chapel by an ICHD determined to not only tear away the memorial walkway but to bulldoze away the hillside right up into the wooden steps leading into the Chapel! If we dont stop this kind of egregious, don't care agency over reaching especially at the local level - what will remain or what should be our local heritage, a heritage in this particular case that for 161 years has been respected and preserved for its beauty and community contributions? What will remain to any of us if the legal protection our deeds and abstracts are supposed to provide us can unnecessarily be blatantly ignored by a county agency?
Please contact County Administrator Larry Bierke - larry.bierke@iowacounty.org - and voice your opinion soon!
Sheryl Schoenfeld
Town of Dodgeville