Brian Boyce
The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE —
What trash the thunderstorms didn’t wash away, the volunteers hoped to clean up.
Hundreds of volunteers hit the city streets Saturday morning for the spring half of Trees Inc.’s annual Keep Terre Haute Beautiful project. The fall project is scheduled for Oct. 2.
Dozens of purple-shirted workers blended with those wearing neon green in the streets of Farrington’s Grove Historical District, as brothers of Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology’s Phi Gamma Delta house joined in for the cleanup. The fraternity, on South Sixth Street, issued fliers throughout the neighborhood offering their services.
“Most of the houses that we’ve done have been within a few blocks of our house,” member Drake Sayer said as he and four of his brothers, dressed in purple FIJI shirts, carried bags of trash up and down the blocks of South Sixth and Center streets.
Tom Burkett, a Farrington’s Grove resident, said the neighborhood’s contingent for the clean-up brought about 100 volunteers to the effort, filling two Dumpsters within a matter of hours.
“It makes the stuff a little heavier,” he said of Friday night and early Saturday morning’s rain showers. But the picking up trash and refuse in the city’s back alleys helps maintain the neighborhood. “It helps to do it twice a year,” he said.
Keep Terre Haute Beautiful is a community project organized annually by TREES Inc. on the first Saturdays of May and October. Volunteers met in the Starbucks parking lot at 25th Street and Wabash Avenue before 9 a.m., assembling maps and supplies of trash bags.
“All of our Dumpsters are full,” organizer Esther Anderson said before 11 a.m. outside Starbucks. About 300 volunteers helped with Saturday’s project, she said. Five 40-yard roll-offs were dispersed throughout the city as volunteers picked up litter and trash from Twelve Points all the way south of Farrington’s Grove. “Trash. Whatever’s on the ground,” she said while volunteers came in reporting “tons of cigarette butts.”
In addition to T-shirts, the organization also gave out between 400 and 500 free seedlings representing a variety of oak, cherry and birch trees.
The Sarah Scott Middle School will host its own neighborhood clean-up next weekend, she said, adding she was glad people turned out despite the rainy weather.
Brian Boyce can be reached at 812-231-4253 or brian.boyce@tribstar.com.
