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A Place Called Home

Writings on the Midwestern Small Town

Edited by Richard O. Davies, Joseph A. Amato & David R. Pichaske

STATUS: AVAILABLE
$24.95, paper, ISBN 0-87351-451-3
445 pp., notes
SUBJECTS: American Studies/History/Sociology

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About the Book | About the Editors | Reviews & Praise | Table of Contents

BOOK EXCERPT

Introduction from A Place Called Home

Small Towns, Of Thee We Sing

The midwestern small town has been overwhelmed by change of every sort. It has lost its claim as a distinct place, a particular locale, or a unique community. Ever more penetrated by outside goods, technologies, ideas, peoples, and agencies, the small town, weakened at every point, has little autonomy and independence left.

In truth, the midwestern small town was never free of change. It was founded in the second half of the nineteenth century by railroads transforming the nation. In the early decades of the twentieth century, it crystallized around a belief in commerce and progress. Today it is changing beyond recognition.

Change came to the small town from all directions. Cars and roads, expanding the grid set down by settlement and railroad, reshaped rural body and mind. Catalogues, movies, and radio incrementally diverted the attention of small-town and farm dwellers to urban markets, expectations, and fantasies. The draft requisitioned the rural boys--especially farm hands and small-town day laborers--for two world wars and later the Korean and Vietnam Wars, proving among other things that you can't keep them "down on the farm" once they have been to the city. The GI Bill convinced two generations of veterans that they didn't need to go back home, and the chance for better wages and opportunities for a better life attracted small-town and rural dwellers to nearby metropolitan centers throughout the century.

At the same time, those who stayed behind focused increasingly on the city and insisted on its goods. They too wanted the best in medical treatment, fire protection, sanitation and running water, and schooling. They wanted swimming pools, bright water-filled contemporary kitchens, paved tennis courts, and green fairways. If they couldn't go to the city, they would bring the city to them.

Goods multiplied, prices diminished, and surplus cash surfaced in the countryside. Rural travel increased, shopping became a matter of choice, and small towns diminished as larger shopping centers grew. Honeymoons and vacations took more and more local people farther and farther away. Over time distant affiliations of every sort played a role in reshaping small-town lives.

Small markets irreversibly gave way to larger markets. In every way available, the rural consumer proved his loyalty to distant markets. Workers and professionals moved out of smaller rural centers. Political subordination followed economic diminution. In increasing numbers, starting in the final decades of the twentieth century, towns were annexed, discarded, or turned into bedroom communities. Correspondingly, metropolitan areas expanded into the countryside. Federal and state funding constituted an ever greater part of the town's economic survival, and rural legislators were forced to try to shake larger crumbs from bigger tables.

No longer could anyone say that the small town stood balanced between the farm and the metropolis. Both center city and remote village were bypassed by distant markets. Suburb by suburb, mobile society avoided both village and downtown. Americans chose to live in neither city nor country but in the city-country. Society sought to fuse country living with city advantage. Rural inhabitants left smaller settlements for larger rural towns and, in turn, they abandoned Main Street to live on the periphery of towns small and large. They built their commerce--principally service industries--in bright shiny strips along edges of town and in industrial parks. The wealthiest, who were often newcomers in town, sought their privacy and built castles, singularly and in housing developments, in the nearby surrounding and scenic countryside, amidst hills and dales, along river edges and on lake fronts.

By the end of the twentieth century, small towns knew that they no longer marched hand in hand with progress and nation. The 1980s definitively called off the parade; the decade's farm crisis tolled a death knell for the small town. However one counted numbers, money, and power, the tally was the same: the small town was manifestly diminished. Its streets had fallen apart; its commercial class had vanished. Its principal client--agriculture--despite ever growing productive powers, belonged to an aging and dwindling group. There were more musicians on the air than farmers on the land.

This situation requires a dramatic accounting: the midwestern town can be pronounced stone dead. The small town is as dead as the entirety of traditional Western European rural life and the peasantry. Indeed, future historical perspectives may conjoin their deaths, judging them victims of the annihilation of space and the accompanying destruction of local and rural life everywhere.

City and town, our funeral sermon suggests, have become one, equal parts of homogenizing mass, commercial, and national society. Talented and ambitious young people have abandoned the small town for a lifetime. Their parents now also leave town annually to be with their children and to spend warmer winters and cooler summers. Exoduses of every sort--of body and mind, permanent and seasonal--have already occurred or are under way. Nursing homes and elderly-care establishments replace schools. Deserted main streets challenge memory to reconstruct noisier days when children and commerce filled corridors along which people really cared, if only for gossip and coffee-klatch reasons, about one another's comings and goings.

In the countryside, even ethnic farming communities (the hardest kernels of rural farm and small village) have now lost their character. And more and more individuals and agencies advocate preserving land, waters, and wild animals at the expense of agriculture. The latter's conquest of water and land is assumed and then forgotten. The atoms of midwestern society have disintegrated.

We may inventory Main Street's missing stores and personalities more specifically. Schools, churches, and fire and police departments have merged, consolidated, or vanished altogether. In the last twenty years, local institutions of every sort--from banks, hospitals, law firms, dentists, and co-ops--have gone regional, joining state and national chains. Along Main Street one counts among new businesses antique, second-hand, rummage, and junk stores (which often form a descending progression), while hardware shops, grocery stores, shoe stores, bakeries, movie theaters, and pool halls close. Talk about revitalization and economic development becomes a second kind of "weather talk." Thriving small towns--whose populations are several thousand or more and which are commonly county seats and regional service centers--lay computer cable and add new indoor skating rinks, libraries, parks, and bike trails. They cannot relent in their efforts to add amenities that will attract new and retain old businesses. They must make desperate efforts to stay even, or they will fall still further behind.

Yet no stacking and piling of metaphors or compounding of numbers can describe what has been lost. Nostalgia--admittedly so often a search for the sensual plenitude of youth's first impressions and experiences--helps us depict the sinking of yesteryear's small town. Nostalgia has it that inhabitants carried out their lives, as ever fewer do today, in a single spot. They conducted the majority of their transactions, great and small, in a single place. They played out their lives and fates on ground they knew to be home. In the confines of a relatively stable, if not fixed circle, they shared events, stories, and suspicions. At all times they knew to the bone the other players on the stage. For them, space, place, locale, community, and home were one. They formed a single microcosm composing nation, world, and humanity.

Critics of Main Street like Sinclair Lewis and his followers moved in the opposite direction. For them, Main Street's narrow and straight ways reflected a band of narrow, straight, and dull shopkeepers. They and their wives led the righteous way in church, club, and committee--in both progressive cause and moral reaction. This elite molded town life to serve self-interest, vanity, and glory, driving the rest to the town's edges and clandestine niches.

Nostalgia and criticism aside, select small towns (especially those with a courthouse) became lead communities, serving as commercial and government centers. They functioned as outposts for the distant metropolis and nation. They instructed town and county inhabitants on what to buy, what not to drink, and what was new and progressive. During wartime, they taught, often with the help of state agencies, how one should most patriotically serve the nation.

On another level, the small town (taking advantage of one of its principal assets) drew to itself cheap labor. It offered workers near and far poorly paid, non-unionized jobs. Without a large and diverse job market, small towns forced workers and their mates--those who chose to stay--to live out their lives at minimum or close to minimum wages, enjoying in turn the benefits of family, safety, and usually lower-cost housing. However, starting in the second half of the twentieth century, the most energetic and ambitious workers left the small town for the metropolitan center, where pay is better and work opportunities more abundant.

Yet this sort of philosophizing begins to ring hollow in its generalization and in the face of the definitional questions it raises. First, we must ask of the uniqueness of the midwestern town itself. Do its character and plight differentiate it from the small towns of other national regions? In fact, might not productive comparisons be made with the small towns of Europe and the world in this age of national and global forces? Does not the twentieth century require a global or trans-regional perspective on the rural and small everywhere? Certainly an affirmative answer is required if only on the basis of a single book, Gert Mak's Jorwerd: The Death of the Village in Late 20th Century Europe. Writing of a single Dutch village in Friesland, he describes how in the course of the last fifty years contemporary technology, markets, society, and government have metamorphosed small, thriving, autonomous agricultural villages. Once filled with stores, bulging with associations, and occupying the lives and minds of its people, Jorwerd has become principally a residence for individual families of commuters in a town almost without store and craft and in a region where agriculture has become a remote, lonely, regulated, and centralized activity. Jorwerd, still a village, is no longer a place and less than half a home.

A second question--which moves us in a different direction--pivots on the size of the small town itself. Should we allow the number 2,500 and below (a division used by the U.S. Bureau of the Census) to define the small town? Surely, a village or hamlet of 100 or fewer (which had few stores and associations even when it flourished) is not a village of 500, which in its heyday of fifty or so years ago would have had a variety of stores and services, including a co-op and bank. In turn, the village of 500 was and is dissimilar to a town of 1,000 which--if it resembles thriving Cottonwood, Minnesota, in 1968--had a Main Street of few blocks holding competing restaurants and grocery stores, a furniture store, a hardware store, tractor sales, and bars, in addition to a movie theater, a doctor, a dentist, a small industry, a large insurance company, many active churches, and a very large Lions Club. Yielding even greater differences and distinctions would be comparisons between towns of 1,000 and those of 2,500, 5,000 and 10,000.

The Minnesota town of Marshall, with a population of 10,000 in 1980, has continued even in the last two decades to have a slightly growing population, reaching almost 13,000 in the 2000 census. Serving as a county seat and a regional service center for twenty to thirty miles in every direction, it houses a four-year educational institution, a major food industry, and many other businesses and industries. In addition to downtown and the mall, its principal east-west bypass has major retail chains and motels, while its central east-west road between downtown and the college has a several-block strip of fast-food emporiums, motels, and regional and national franchises. Thanks largely to a meat-cutting factory and a few computer parts plants, at which immigrants from Mexico, Somalia, and Laos worked in considerable numbers, the rate of population turnover in Marshall between 1990 and 1995 exceeded that of the Twin Cities proper.

In fact, demographers and students of small-town commerce resort to a far finer hierarchy than 2,500 and below. They distinguished hamlets, composed of a gas station, café, and grocery store (which increasingly have been combined into a single convenience store); a minimum convenience center; a full convenience center; a partial shopping center (with four to eight specialized shops); the complete shopping center (with nine or more); and--the heavyweight of heavyweights--the primary wholesale-retail center, which incorporates all the functions of the previous and contains more than one hundred businesses.

Places gathered and divided in this way are of course more than representatives of a typology. They have a history. They do not pass through time with fixed mass on constant orbit. Influenced by a variety of separate and interdependent local factors, organizations, and personalities, small towns (always of distinguishing size, shape, composition, and relationship to the immediate periphery) respond to alterations in regional business and demography. They also have been shaped by vacillations in consumer purchasing power and demand; the introduction of new technologies, especially laborsaving devices; alterations in transportation and communication industries; and overall trends in the national and global economies. In sum, change in any one place might require micro- and macro-analysis. Explanation may have to focus simultaneously on rivalry with a nearby town; on a hometown business's choice; on a trend in a national agricultural or even commercial or industrial market; or upon a decision by state government to locate a public institution or expand a highway.

As Joseph A. Amato and John W. Meyer explain in The Decline of Rural Minnesota, several general factors determine the fate of towns of different sizes. By analyzing the 1990 census, they established (for rural Minnesota) that agriculture was in a state of demographic decline; that is, smaller numbers of farm families inhabited larger acreages. It followed, as numbers illustrated, that the more rural a county (the more it was composed of farms and small towns of 5,000 or fewer) the older and greater the decline, the origins of which could be traced as far back as the 1950 census. Only three of Minnesota's counties, which had towns of approximately 10,000 or more, escaped demographic decline. Decline, reaching as high as 18 percent in Minnesota's most rural counties, doubled the average percentage of decline in the 1960s and 1970s and was matched by the aging of farm and small-town population. The American farmer's median age of sixty years was replicated in select smaller towns and villages throughout Minnesota. The most severe cases of decline in rural Minnesota--as shown by the 1995 census--showed natural decline in a dozen counties in which deaths outnumbered births. The flight of youth, the end of Main Street, and the death of small town and farm--this whole doleful litany of small town decline, vividly apparent in agricultural Minnesota--characterized all the agricultural regions of the Midwest in the 1980s and 1990s.

Working just to the west of Minnesota, in Plains Country Towns, John Hudson convincingly shows that decline reached the prairie in North Dakota at the time of settlement itself. Competing railroads overbuilt lines and towns. Indeed, countless imagined towns died on the drafting board, becoming instant ghost towns. Others, if not ploughed in the ground, are now materially vanishing in dry winds and swirling dust on the prairie, having reached their demographic apex of a handful of people in the very first year of their existence. Surely, decline reached the agricultural west early when, in 1900, the population of North and South Dakota declined in absolute numbers.

Working its way east, decline started to crisscross small-town America in the 1920s, conveyed by the automobiles that took rural citizens, body and mind, out of their own small villages to nearby towns and cities. Decline became generalized in succeeding decades, as youth in ever greater numbers left farm and town, county bank assets accumulated in regional centers, and small service centers served fewer with less. By the 1990 census, even the most ardent boosters were stymied in their attempts to deny this exodus and the pessimistic trends associated with it.

There could be exceptions. A small town could have a brilliant entrepreneurial son who stayed home and built a food industry. It could be situated on a large lake, drawing a recreation and a retirement community, or along a major expressway, or close to a regional center or an expanding metropolitan center. If numbers alone counted, optimists could overlook the fact that even towns that grew had lost their functions as a community and been transformed into a bedroom community or remade into suburb.

The censuses of 1990 and 2000 confirmed a dark story: the nation's agricultural regions and its small towns were on a treacherous slippery slope. They were now only smaller pieces of the whole; they were distant and cold bodies in a contracting universe. Midwestern agriculture and its small towns were simply following the same path, yielding to the same economic laws that brought down mining, lumbering, and farming in the course of the century. However venerated the nation's heartland, its small towns had served merely as vehicles for an economic colossus on its way to national, continental, and global economic empires. Each in his own way, geographers John Borchert and John Hudson and historians William Cronon, Hal Barron, and Richard O. Davies offer a century-long path describing the rise and fall of the small town.

The 2000 census makes it clear that the small town--defined as 2,500 or fewer, or even 10,000 or fewer--continues to decline in the Midwest as percentage of total population. Paralleling the more than two-century-old eclipse of countryside by city and rural by urban life, the decline of small towns has taken place for the last hundred years, and at accelerating rates for the last fifty.

Specific calculations from the census exist for just two states, Ohio and Iowa, and suggest, if only as hypothesis, that steeper decline proceeded from east to west. Small towns arguably decline where populations are more dense, key cities are bigger, more numerous, and proximate, and connecting systems of highways and interstates are more abundant. Small towns at the eastern end of the Midwest have more quickly been transformed into burgeoning suburbs on the one hand, or drained of population and services by adjacent metropolitan markets, influences, and opportunities on the other. In either case, small towns in the populous quarters of the eastern band of the Midwest, or more precisely, small towns--whatever their compass location--in the vicinity of large urban centers have been more rapidly metamorphosed than those more distant from a metropolis.

This line of speculation contradicts our earlier identification of decline with the West and the Dakotas. There, it was argued that the smaller the spur along which a settlement occurred, the more likely it never took root at all or began to decline sooner after founding. The further west a settlement was and the later the date of incorporation, the greater likelihood the town would be not only small but also vulnerable. As if it were the runt of a civilization's litters, it started life imperiled.

To accept the truth of both of these theories suggests that the optimal place for the settlement, survival, and longevity of small towns was somewhere in the middle of the Midwest. It was not along the more populous eastern zones that quickly absorbed and integrated the land, population, society, and small towns. Nor was it in the more arid, more remote, and far less populated zones of the Midwest, bordering on the high prairie that was not as welcoming to agriculture and carried with it a standing cost for shipping goods and a comparative scarcity of amenities.

It can further be conjectured that optimal conditions for a varied and long small-town existence occurred along a band reaching from southwestern Wisconsin, Minnesota, and eastern South Dakota south to Iowa and western Nebraska to central and eastern Kansas, Missouri, and western Illinois. Settled and defined by agriculture in the decades immediately following the Civil War, these areas flourished thanks to available water and good soils. Outside markets, though accessible and stimulating, were not overwhelming in their intrusions. In this zone, agriculture and market found a truce--a kind of rough and shifting equilibrium. For more than a century, farmers and small towns fashioned their lives around the reality and illusion that, as tillers of the land and practitioners of free enterprise, they had a covenant with the nation--and, indeed, they more than any other group were its essence.

Small towns have now entered, as suggested at the beginning of this essay, a period of differentiation, transition, and metamorphosis. Like the proverbial soldier, they don't die, they just seem to fade away. Without a viable Main Street business core and with only a house and trailer or two, they are no longer by any measure a town, a village, and a community. They are stopping-off places for a day, a few years, or a decade or two on the way to somewhere else. Transformed into bedroom communities, resort spots, or suburbs, they are no longer the kernel communities of experience and association they once were.

Depicting their differentiation and transformation will be the principal task of new breeds of historians and writers. Their best students will have to seek multiple ways to explore the external dimension of this change. At the same time, as suggested in Joseph A. Amato's Rethinking Home and so well illustrated by John Radzilowski's Prairie Town, they will have to dedicate themselves to understanding in detail the diverse subjects associated with the contemporary metamorphosis of the local. They will have to scrap older ideas that the midwestern small town constituted a single structure and a common experience. They will have to seek the sense of lives and places that have multiple meanings; they will have to study villages filled with worlds, microcosms bursting with macrocosms.

The story of the small will be global. It will be intertwined with region, nation, and world. It will be about markets and democracy. It will also be about humanity that lives less and less bounded by space and increasingly independently of place. It will be about a world in an era of whirling change--when, not dissimilar to the subjects of peasant and countryside, farm and barns, the small town will be an artifact by which we seek to reconstruct past minds and communities.