Ernie Pyle home demolished

DANA, Ind. - The western Indiana farmhouse where World War II correspondent and former IU student Ernie Pyle grew up has been demolished, shocking preservationists who've worked for years to keep Pyle's legacy alive.\nThe home's demolition in mid-August came after the family that owned it had offered the house to the Ernie Pyle Museum in Dana, the state -- or anyone who would take it.\n"All we asked was that they move the house from where it stood, because we could not afford to fix it up, and vandals were breaking into it. It became a liability issue with us," owner Gene Goforth said by phone from his Huntsville, Texas, home.\nThe hilltop farmhouse outside of Dana, about 20 miles north of Terre Haute, was where Pyle lived from roughly age 2 to 18.\n"It's the place where he grew up and wrote about so many times when he recounted his childhood," said Evelyn Hobson, retired curator of the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site in Dana.\nGoforth, whose family owned the farm across the road from the Pyle farm, said he has fond memories of visiting with Pyle's parents and Pyle himself when he returned home from his journalistic sojourns.\nCharity Pollard, acting site manager for the Ernie Pyle State Historic Site in Dana, said she was disappointed that efforts to fail the home failed.\n"I went to my bosses and my people, and there were no answers," she said. "The state is surplusing properties right now instead of acquiring them."\nLaura Minzes, deputy director of historic site structures and real estate for the Department of Natural Resources' division of museums and historic sites, said money was the primary reason the state passed on the opportunity to acquire the farmhouse.\n"Moving the house would have eliminated its eligibility for any sort of National Register nomination," she said.\nThe existing historic site in Dana consists of a house that is believed to be the one in which Pyle was born. It was located elsewhere and moved to the site and therefore, isn't on the National Register of Historic Places, either.\nTwo Quonset huts donated by the U.S. Army contain Pyle exhibits and memorabilia and serve as a visitor's center.\nPyle, who was killed by a Japanese sniper on the tiny Pacific island of Ie Shima in April 1945, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1944 as a Scripps-Howard columnist and correspondent. Decades later, he was awarded a posthumous Purple Heart.\nHobson said veterans and people interested in Pyle's history always asked about his boyhood home, and she always directed them to "the little farmhouse on the hill."\nShe said she was dismayed at the news the house is gone forever.\n"I'm going to get in my car right now and go over there to cry," Hobson said.