I wasn’t looking for a revelation on a country road in southeastern Illinois. But on the outskirts of Galatia — a tiny town where Appalachian hardship seems to have drifted west and settled in — that’s what I found.

It was not a burning bush in some biblical wilderness, but an industrial 3D printer the size of a small garage — a machine, I would learn, that took a $1.1 million investment to get to Illinois, carrying with it the promise of an affordable housing renaissance across the region known as Little Egypt.

And it called to me.

I drove past it again and again. A year prior, in August 2024, this printer was at the center of a groundbreaking ceremony attended by more than 100 people, myself included. I covered the event for Capitol News Illinois and watched as the machine laid down the first layers of what was supposed to be a new beginning. Two local men had promised to help save Cairo, Illinois, by using the machine to print new homes in a town that desperately needed them.

I watched as state and local politicians ceremoniously tossed dirt. Officials posed for photographs beside the machine, holding it up as proof that a new era had arrived. They promised fast, efficient, modern homes — and with them, the sense that someone, at last, was paying attention to this corner of the state.

A year later, though, the printer had produced the framing for exactly one duplex — but the project was abandoned before the interior was finished. Before anyone could move in, the walls cracked.