Developers Halt Louisiana Grain Elevator Project That Would Disrupt Black Historic Sites

by Seth Freed Wessler

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A development company abruptly halted plans for a sprawling grain export facility in Louisiana this week after a three-year campaign led by members of a Black community who said it would have ripped through rural neighborhoods, old plantation tracts and important historic sites. At the start of a meeting on Tuesday, Greenfield LLC announced that it was “ceasing all plans” to construct the $400 million, milelong development in the middle of the town of Wallace in St. John the Baptist Parish.

After a company spokesperson made the announcement in a small Wallace church, community members seated in the pews burst into jubilant cheers.

“It is an unbelievable victory, and it shows what happens when communities fight,” said Joy Banner, a Wallace resident who has led resistance to the facility as the co-founder, along with her sister Jo Banner, of a group called the Descendants Project. “The erasure of the Black communities didn’t work.”

The proposed Greenfield development, which would have been one of the country’s largest grain facilities, was the subject of a May 2022 ProPublica investigation that revealed how a whistleblower had issued a complaint to state authorities about the project — including evidence that consultants involved with it had buried her findings. An archaeological report she’d drafted on behalf of Greenfield — concluding that the development would harm Wallace and nearby historic sites including several plantations and an old cemetery — was gutted to exclude any mention of that harm.

The consulting firm that issued the report previously told ProPublica that it’s not uncommon for the firm to change drafts of reports after clients review them and that it “was not required by Greenfield or anyone else for that matter to make changes” the firm does not support. Greenfield did not respond to ProPublica’s questions about its consultants removing the findings from the report.

The report was part of a federal Army Corps of Engineers permitting process that requires developers to consider the impacts of their projects on communities and cultural and historic sites.

Several federal agencies raised concerns about the project. The Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, which is the lead federal agency overseeing preservation policies, wrote in a June 2022 letter, prompted by ProPublica’s reporting, that the area around Wallace should be considered for protected historic designation. “The significance of an historic district located in or encompassing the community of Wallace would be inextricably linked to the community’s living, ongoing experience of the district and their sense of place in the larger landscape,” the letter to the Corps said.

Months later, the Corps rejected the archaeological report as “insufficient.” The agency concluded instead that the development would likely harm historic plantations, including the Whitney Plantation, a nationally recognized memorial to the enslaved, as well as nearby communities and historic burial grounds. The Corps ordered Greenfield to conduct a new study. But when Greenfield submitted the revised assessment, the Corps responded with a letter stating that “the report just doesn’t demonstrate adequate engagement” with the mostly Black communities impacted by development.

In May 2023, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the country’s leading preservation nonprofit, designated the 11-mile stretch of the Mississippi River around Wallace as one of the country’s most endangered historic places. The group called it “an intact cultural landscape in an area otherwise oversaturated with heavy industry.” Not long after, the National Park Service launched a yearlong process to consider designating the stretch of land as a national historic landmark district, which can help protect the area from development. That process is likely to conclude this summer. Last August, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services chimed in with a letter of its own, urging the Corps to consider likely “environmental burdens and health inequities” that the grain facility could contribute to.

The area around the former plantation land where Greenfield planned its development is home not just to the Whitney Plantation museum and memorial but also another standing plantation, historic burial sites and communities whose residents trace their ancestry directly to people enslaved on the land. Wallace, where the Banners live, was founded by Black Civil War soldiers who fought against the Confederacy and by people who’d been enslaved nearby. The facility, a massive system of conveyors and 54 silos that would transport and store grain to be delivered around the world, would have been erected directly adjacent to Wallace homes.

Erin Edwards, the consultant-turned-whistleblower who drafted the initial cultural resources report, resigned from the consulting firm after her draft was radically edited.

“I wrote a report that brought up the challenges they would face building there, and the impacts it would have, and they completely ignored it,” Edwards told ProPublica this week. “But you cannot hide or deny that much history. And you cannot deny that there are people and communities who are connected to and love this place and want to save it.”

Greenfield said in a statement that the extended timeline of the Corps’ consultation process for the permit led to the company’s decision to terminate the project. “We did everything in our power to keep this project on track. The Army Corp of Engineers has chosen to repeatedly delay this project by catering to special interests,” Greenfield said in a statement. “Today, sadly, we are no closer to a resolution than we were when we began this process.”

The Corps said the process is necessary to ensure compliance with the law. “Greenfield Louisiana LLC has proposed a project in a setting with many cultural resources and adjacent to a community with Environmental Justice concerns,” the Corps said in a statement. “The potential impacts to these resources require specific efforts under applicable laws and regulations.”

Wallace lies in a stretch of communities along the Mississippi River in Louisiana often referred to as Cancer Alley because of the high concentration of pollution-emitting industrial sites. For generations, communities have fought harmful development projects but have usually lost, and one petrochemical plant or industrial facility after another has been erected.

Wallace has been an exception to this steady expansion. In 1992, a coalition of community and civil rights groups and environmental advocates fought off plans by the Taiwan-based plastic company Formosa to build a rayon plant on the same plot of land Greenfield later purchased. The plant, which the company said would be a boon to the local economy, was expected to produce dangerous levels of toxic industrial pollution.

Instead, for the next two decades, the land was used to grow sugar cane. Then, in 2021, Greenfield launched its plans to develop the land for industrial use. The company said it would provide hundreds of needed jobs, and it soon began pounding massive metal test beams into the fields around Wallace. Nearby residents claimed at the time that the developer was acting as if the project was a foregone conclusion.

“This community has had to fend off two major corporations over the course of two generations that would have wiped Wallace off the map,” said Pam Spees, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents the Descendants Project. “That they have succeeded in spite of the massive challenges, power imbalances and the divide-and-conquer tactics used by these corporations and their local government counterparts is a testament to the resilience, dedication and love of the Banners and others who stood and fought for Wallace, and the brightest hopes of their ancestors who founded it.”

Joy Banner said the communities in her region would be served best by a responsible, community-driven tourism effort that would preserve and maintain memorial sites centered on the history of slavery and Black struggle. This year, the group announced that it had acquired the Woodland Plantation, across the river from Wallace. The plantation was the site of the 1811 German Coast uprising, in which hundreds of enslaved people, inspired in part by the Haitian Revolution, took up arms and planned to seize New Orleans as a free territory. U.S. officials and militias killed close to 100 of those involved in the uprising.

“We are in an area that’s layered with cultural and historical resources and with history that matters to us,” Banner said. “The narrative that there’s nothing here is over. What we made clear is that we already have value here.”

Greenfield has yet to formally withdraw its Corps permit application, and the Corps said it is waiting for that official notice before it considers the project dead. Greenfield still controls the property it purchased for $40 million, which St. John the Baptist Parish last year redesignated for industrial use. (The Descendants Project is suing the parish over that designation. Greenfield has intervened to defend it.)

Ultimately, Banner said, “our vision is that we get to sit together and envision our future, to determine what we want to do in our community, instead of having to settle for people telling us what we need.”

This content originally appeared on ProPublica and was authored by by Seth Freed Wessler.