Morses Line, one of
15 ports between Vermont and Quebec, was among the first in the country
slated for repair. It was built in 1934. Its only detention facility is a
set of handcuffs attached to a wooden bench. It has no place to inspect
vehicles, so customs officers have to do it in the middle of the road.
It has a road gate that they have to open and close manually. Its roof
leaks.

“It is unsafe,’’ said
Marco A. Lopez, spokesman for US Customs and Border Protection.

Lopez said the government has been
cooperating with the Rainvilles, and responded to their concerns by
scaling back an earlier plan to use 10 acres of the farm.

Allison Stanger, director of the Rohatyn
Center for International Affairs at Middlebury College, said the
government is right to shore up aging, little-used border crossings.

“If there’s a weak link in the chain,
that’s precisely what our enemies would target for getting things into
the country,’’ she said. “It seems far-fetched to think that something
like this could happen in beautiful Vermont. But before it happened,
what American would have thought that someone would fly a plane into a
building?’’

The Rainvilles
suggest that the Morses Line port, where only 14,811 vehicles crossed in
2009, could be shut down altogether. They say the stimulus money would
be better spent upgrading the busy Highgate Springs port 11 miles to the
west, where Interstate 89 connects with a Canadian route to Montreal.
Hundreds of thousands of vehicles cross there each year.

US Senator Patrick Leahy, a Vermont
Democrat who supports the family, raised the idea of closing the Morses
Line port with Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet
Napolitano last month. Napolitano promised to hold a public hearing
Saturday in Franklin, Vt., the town that includes Morses Line.

Lopez said the government has already
hired a contractor, but he added that officials will hear out opinions
voiced at the meeting.

“All
options are on the table,’’ he said. “If the community and the state and
whatever disagree with us, we will talk to Canada about closing the
border.’’

The Rainvilles say
they have nothing against border officials. Two years ago, they closed
the farm so that law enforcement agencies could use it to conduct a
drill on the response to a nuclear, biological, or chemical attack. But
they were rankled by a recent government assessment that described the
4.9 acres as undeveloped and insignificant to their operation.

The plot is a fraction of their 220-acre
property, but it constitutes about one-twelfth of their available hay
land. It yields 1,000 bales of hay a year; without it, the family would
need to buy the hay at $3.25 a bale, and possibly reduce the number of
cows, said Craig Rainville, 32.

He
calculates that the cost would soon exceed the sum the government is
offering, and cripple a farm that has been named to the National
Register of Historic Places for its intact 19th-century buildings and
pristine landscape and designated a Dairy of Distinction by the Vermont
Department of Agriculture.

The
family recently put up a “Save This Farm’’ sign at the entrance to the
property.

Last week Brian
Rainville stood on a field of alfalfa and indicated orange posts erected
by government surveyors to delineate the boundaries of the disputed
plot.

“They look at it like a
vacant lot,’’ he said. “They do not understand how vital that land is
to who we are and what we do.’’