What happened to small towns?

[BlueTrain]

I think the last two posts pretty much tell the story of the small town after WWII. Not pretty and the depression years weren't all that great either. But speaking only of my own hometown, it didn't happen fast and the bypasses weren't built until after the main industry left town, but it happened just the same. It is still a bustling little place but the bustle is in another part of town, as it were. The new industry is hospitality but not exactly tourism.

In theory, there will never be another new small town like we knew up into the 1960s. In places where there is growth, and there are such places, there will be housing developments on the one hand and a shopping center on the other and a car will be a necessity, as they are already. The housing developments will mostly be nice and rather more upscale than they were in the post-war construction housing boom. And the shopping center, typically a "plaza," will be generic, all businesses being chain stores, both national and regional, with the only exceptions being things like barber shops, beauty parlors, tattoo parlors and the like. The supermarket, the convenience stores, the banks, most of the restaurants, the drug stores, the hardware/lumber yards and the department stores will all be chain stores and barely indistinguishable from the next shopping plaza on down the road. There is basically no town. Somewhere there will be schools but no one will walk to school. It isn't such a bad life, provided you have a half-way decent job, but it won't be like it used to be, if it ever was.

The last business remaining in a lot of small towns is the liquor store and sometimes the taverns.

 

[Fading Fast]

...The last business remaining in a lot of small towns is the liquor store and sometimes the taverns.

Ain't that the truth. The town I just posted about had several taverns and liquor stores still in business into the '70s, even though, other than a newsstand, a dry cleaner (that looked absolutely filthy inside and out), a coffee shop and few random stores, everyone else had left. It's amazing that there was, somehow, enough money to keep several liquors stores and taverns (yes several of both) going while everything else failed.

 

[BlueTrain]

Of course it is rare that a town will become an actual ghost town. People will still live there. A town like where my wife's parents moved when they retired might become largely a retirement community. That in itself can be enough to support a certain level of businesses, even to include small independent businesses like plumbers, hairdressers, restaurants and so on, depending a lot on the level of wealth and income of the retirees. So the community is different. Or perhaps if there's a school or college there, it's new life is centered around that instead of whatever it used to be. The place where my wife's parents moved was both a farming community and still is, as well as hosting a fishing industry, which isn't what it used to be. And speaking of that particular community where my in-laws moved, it underwent the same gentrification to some extent, with the skyrocketing price of waterfront property, new "city" regulations (like leash laws) and the appearance of art galleries and trendy new restaurants. The downtown, such as it was, underwent the same gutting of businesses as other small towns for the same reasons, even though there is no bypass, interstate or even a railroad. In fact, the town expanded with a big new shopping center with a supermarket, a couple of fast food places, a chain drug store and so on, all within a half-mile of what used to the be the center of town.

In the absence of a real tourist industry, meaning anything seasonal, there can still be good things about such a place. When a town evolves into a retirement community where relatively well-off people move from the city, the community can actually become wealthier. It certainly happened there and it's too far from most anything to ever be a suburb or bedroom community. It didn't happen in my hometown, though. Anyway, the tax base improves and eventually the schools will improve, which in that case tended to destroy the private academy industry. And being a retirement community, medical services will probably improve and that at least did happen in my home town. It's hard to generalize what happens to the original families who had probably lived around there for generations. The ones who were farmers will still be farmers. Changes to the fishing industry were unaffected by those changes but rather by changes in local fishing conditions (it is possible to actually catch all the fish, too). They won't like the higher taxes that are probably inevitable and anyway, all of the retiring come-here's bought their property at highly inflated (market) prices, so the just moved away and bought one of the nice little houses that you pass on the way there.

And the state liquor store is doing just fine in the same place it's been for fifty years.

This was about small towns but cities have changed, too, but for other reasons and the dynamics are altogether different.
People have been living in the cities in this country as long as they have in small towns, after all. But it seems rare that people are ever nostalgic about living in the city in 1910.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think a lot of the "idealized Good Old Days small town" imagery owes a lot to the sort of nostalgic cartoons drawn in the 1920s and 1930s by the likes of H. T. Webster, Clare Briggs, and J. R. Williams. They always seemed to be drawing about The Old Swimming Hole and barefoot kids a-wandering along dirt roads from the Little Red Schoolhouse down to the Old General Store for penny candy. The fact that this sort of imagery -- which was even then considered nostalgia for a vanishing time -- dates back so far suggests that it has more to do with the selective memories of the middle-aged than it does with anything having to do with the reality of small town life in any era. These nostalgics of the 1920s and 1930s were remembering a late 19th Century world that was lot less pleasant or innocent in reality than their memories made it, but the sheer amount of material produced that promoted those images ensured that it would become an ingrained part of cultural memory.

There was a major nostalgia fad in the late 1940s and early 1950s for "The Good Old Days," which were considered a nebulous period from about 1900 up until World War I -- you'd see exactly this kind of imagery on giveaway gas station calendars, knick-knacks, dime-store wall ornaments, and so forth. Once again, the middle-aged were looking back fondly on the very narrow vision of childhood and projecting it into a reality that left out the rough edges, or turned them into humorous quirks. If you look at a lot of the products of this fad, from "The Music Man" to Disneyland's "Main Street USA," and then consider the ages of those who created those products, it all falls right into place.

 

[BlueTrain]

Our nostalgia for the past is paralleled by the idea that we are living in very troubled times. We got trouble, right here in River City!

But on the other hand, some of our troubles are real and some parts of the past (for some people) were pretty rosy. All you have too do is look around you and wonder what produced the gingerbread houses and the pretty nice storefronts in town, even if the houses are run down and the storefronts are boarded up. It doesn't follow that every town had such places but nostalgia is rooted in reality. It's just that we believe that we would have lived in the nicer houses in town and shopped at the nicer stores. Our reality would not have been the same as someone else's reality. I remember the nice houses in town and one really nice house is still there (there are others) and to this day I have no idea who lived there. There were nice stores in town that none of my family ever set foot in. It's a little like imagining living in a castle in Europe in the 13th century, ignoring the fact that most people actually lived in hovels outside the walls (I guess they didn't have shacks then) and there was the matter of the plague. Nostalgia has been called a romantic longing for something you never experienced.

Speaking again of my hometown again, because where I live is practically another planet, there must be some degree of prosperity there, in spite of the drop in the population. The county supports a couple of huge car dealerships, one of which is on the site of what was the drive-in movie theater. But it's outside of town and that says a lot. Before, there were two or three car dealerships actually inside the city limits. I don't think there's a BMW dealership anywhere there and that says something, too. There are actually new housing developments here and there--and mobile home parks, too. So I don't know what to say except that it's almost like the town doesn't matter anymore. There is a WalMart there as well as a Lowe's, both of which I'm sure are well-patronized and I think they might even be within the city limits but I'm not sure about that.

I sometimes think about moving back there even though my wife would have none of that. But I don't know anyone there any more and when someone speaks, they sound funny.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I grew up in a pretty homogenous town, which had advantages and disadvantages. There weren't any "better" stores, and only a couple of "better" neighborhoods that we never went to. For the most part we were all working/lower-middle class types who had the same kinds of jobs, bought the same kinds of goods, wore the same kinds of clothes, ate the same kinds of food, lived in the same kinds of generic clapboard houses, and went to the same schools. I only knew one kid in my life who ever went to a private school, the son of a doctor who'd moved here from Massachusetts, and we gave him a hard time when he returned for the summer spouting prep-school slang. My cousin finally ended up pushing him off a wharf to get him to wise up.

The main class division in my town was Methodists vs. Congregationalists. Methodists were working-class, Congos were middle-class. There really didn't seem to be any theological basis to this division that I could see, it was more a matter of ingrained culture. We thought the Congos were stuck up, and the Congos thought we were riff-raff.

 

[BlueTrain]

My hometown was at least large enough to support a number of doctors and dentists and presumably lawyers. It was a county seat, after all, but we never had anything to do with lawyers that I knew of. But yes, there were a couple of men's shops and a couple of lady's shops, all of which were locally owned but we didn't patronize stores like that since nobody in our family had any social ambitions or pretentiousness. My clothes came from G.C. Murphy and on the rare occasion of the requirement for a new suit, we went to Leggett's, which was a department store that is now part of Belk's. Of course everyone went to one or the other of the two supermarkets in town, one being an A&P, the other a Kroger. There were even two florists. There were lots of churches in town. They were either "big" churches on the main street or they weren't. The denomination was secondary, although there was also a Roman Catholic church, which didn't neatly fit that breakdown. One of the churches on the main street even moved to another part of town, to a new building, and the new location was actually on Main Street, which was never the main street.

In junior high and high school I usually sat next to a doctor's son when we were arranged alphabetically and I even saw him at the class reunion I last attended. He wasn't a doctor but a lawyer instead. I never knew private schools even existed until well after finishing high school, even though I had seen all the advertisements for private schools and military academies in the back of National Geographic. I just never made the connection.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Our three local groceries all had kind of a specialized nature, so they weren't so much competitors as they complemented each other. None of them were in any way supermarkets -- they were just little neighborhood-type groceries. Ruben's/Bud's/Bob's was kind of an all-purpose store where we got most of our stuff. Al-Rose had an excellent meat counter. Sid's, which disappeared around 1970, was the place the kids went for candy and popsicles and bubble-gum cards, and the adults went for cigarettes and newspapers. It was more what, in New England, we used to call a "spa" or what New Yorkers would call a "candy store" than a full-service grocery.

The other two stores continued into the early eighties, but were eventually supplanted by a more conventional "supermarket" type of deal.

We had only one doctor in town, an elderly dour-faced fellow who kept office hours in a dreary brick building on Main Street right next to Sid's, where the upper floor was leased to a "Full Gospel Church" group that nobody anybody seemed to know attended. We had no dentists -- everybody went to the next town to see a fellow universally known as "Bunnell the Butcher" when dental care was necessary. The only lawyer I remember was still practicing up until they picked him up for indecent exposure in a parking lot a few years back. Good old wholesome small town values.

 

[ChiTownScion]

The main class division in my town was Methodists vs. Congregationalists. Methodists were working-class, Congos were middle-class. There really didn't seem to be any theological basis to this division that I could see, it was more a matter of ingrained culture. We thought the Congos were stuck up, and the Congos thought we were riff-raff.

Not really "riff raff." More akin to "Baptists.... who can read." (Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories )

 

[LizzieMaine]

My grandmother would have no truck with Baptists. At their merest mention she'd tell you about the girl she knew when she was young who got baptized in the Passagassawakeg River in March and died of pneumonia.

She did, however, seem to like Seventh Day Adventists, because whenever they came around she'd buy their literature. I was weaned on "Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories," and we had a big, impressive copy of "Desire of Ages" that she'd use to press flowers and paste clippings into like it was a scrapbook.

 

[BlueTrain]

When I said "supermarkets" in my hometown, I didn't mean to imply they were at all large, because they weren't. Compared to stores around here, they were tiny. But even before we moved away (when I had one semester to go in high school!!!), a new supermarket opened that was actually big, although it didn't begin to offer the variety of foods available in supermarkets here. But most of the reason is we have a very diverse population around here now.

Although as I mentioned, there were a lot of churches, it shouldn't be assumed that people were all that theologically oriented, to put it one way. There was a local television program called something like "Ask the pastors" hosted by a Roman Catholic and a Protestant (probably Methodist) clergyman. It was a call-in type program and they would field questions from listeners who called in worried about some hair-splitting issue that had been troubling them. Well, sometimes they would sit there with the phone in front of them and it wouldn't ring and it wouldn't ring and it wouldn't ring. So they'd just talk to one another. I found that part to be very funny.

At the time, in the 1950s, there were still real general stores out in the country where you could buy meat, canned goods, bread and sweets, overalls, ammunitions, maybe tools and dry goods and on credit, too, at least if you lived around there and if you did, your family had probably been there since before the war, in this case meaning the Civil War. They're gone now. Some of them functioned as the post office, too, with a corner of the store partitioned off for that purpose.

There was also a commercial institution present in some towns called a corner store. Lum & Abner called it a "jot 'em down store," a term my father actually used. The contemporary equivalent was a convenience store. They carried a lot of the same things that the supermarket carried, only in tiny quantities. The supermarket and the corner store I'm thinking of, both of which I patronized, were within a block of each other. But it was mainly a place for kids to buy candy and sodas, which we called "pop."

Outside of town, on the main roads into (or out of) town were another kind of store, which were essentially overgrown fruit stands. They or similar ones are still there, too, along with all the convenience stores that are part of gas stations now. At the time, I believe their chief function was for somewhere for people to go on Sundays to buy bread and milk because most stores were closed that day because of Blue Laws. Blue Laws and "Fair trade laws" are both things of the past now.

 

[ChiTownScion]

My grandmother would have no truck with Baptists.

I started out as Roman Catholic and have been Presbyterian for well over 30 years. We like to say that a Presbyterian is a Methodist with a savings account... whereas an Episcopalian is a Presbyterian who manages to live well off of his investments.

 

[Fading Fast]

Growing up in the late '60s / '70s, I could feel the transition from small grocery store to supermarket taking place as both existed in our town. My mom was very budget conscious - we had to be - and she went to several stores based on who either had something cheaper or carried the version that was cheaper (to be fair, sometimes, we didn't buy the cheapest but were brand loyal - my dad was only drinking Dr. Brown's soda which is why we'd stock up when it went on sale, but we weren't price shopping it against other brands).

But by then, nine out of ten times, the supermarket was less expensive than the grocery store. I'm guiltier than most in lamenting the passing of this or "wasn't it great when we had...," but having lived through inflation, we were just trying to survive like everyone else and if a supermarket was less expensive, that was where we were shopping.

Supermarkets then - at least ours - weren't what they've become - mega stores that go on for ever and sell everything. Back then, they were four or five times (not forty or fifty) times the size of the local grocery store and had a system - automatic doors (actuated by rubber floor pads, I think), carts, almost everything on a shelf, organized checkout lines, etc.; whereas, things were more haphazard in the grocery store - maybe a hand basket, a lot of stuff behind counters that you had to ask for help, one chaotic line at the register, etc.

Looking back, based on price and convenience, the grocery stores didn't stand a chance. That said, the one that survived - more of an Italian deli / grocery (and owned by a first generation Italian-American, a friend of my dad) - survived by natural differentiation and a still-strong Italian-American community in the town that wasn't going to find the foods and ingredients they wanted in the new supermarkets.

Not being Italian, the place was exotic to me, but was where I fell in love with fresh mozzarella cheese (which, "crazily" floated in water). Also, I remember the owner was always nice to me - I'm sure 'cause of my dad - and gave me a few pretzel rods (from those glass cylinders) whenever we went in. Thinking about it now, it was a very early "artisanal" store - but with a lot of mundane stuff as well.

But again, the grocery stores didn't stand a chance.

 

[BlueTrain]

Although I never had the foggiest idea of big store ownership in the 1950s, we still knew the people who worked in the store and that is still true in a lot of the stores where I go now, including banks. The daughter of the man behind the meat counter was in my fist grade class. They only lived a block from the store, an A&P and a block from the grade school in the other direction. She had a dimple and I thought she was the cutest girl in school. I actually saw her year before last at our 50th high school reunion and I told her that, too, probably for the first time.

There was one store on the main street in town that was called a meat market and of which I only have the vaguest of memories. It didn't last through the 1950s but I don't know how old it was. A&P was in business for a long, long time but I don't know how old that particular store was. A&P is history now. There was also a Kroger's but we never shopped there. It was small, too, about the same size as the A&P.

 

[vitanola]

Our town is the county seat, and was a division point on the New York Central Railroad, complete with shops and a roundhouse. Population in 1910 was 5001, At that time we had a large Screen Door factory, the Railroad Shops, The Flouring Mill (which was at the time the largest packager of mixes in the world), a Sash and Door mill, a manufacturer of gas engines and farm lighting plants, a wire company, a brewery, a tanning mill, a worsted mill, a manufacturer of men's ready-to-wear, a cotton mill, a manufacturer of shirtwaists, a large ice house ( supplied the cities of Toledo, Sandusky and Cleveland with ice) two canneries, three creameries, a slaughterhouse, three grocery stores, four dry-goods shops, two hardware stores, three bakeries, two fuel companies, three pharmacies, two five-and-dimes, two tailor shops, five dressmakers establishments, a milliners, two telephone companies (Bell and Independent -Not interconnected!), three butcher shops, a wholesale florist, two nurseries, a wallpaper store, four banks, two building and loan societies, five lodges, a whitesmith, three plumbers, three electricians , a city owned electric water and streetcar utiltiy.

 

[Joe50's]

the idealised towns are mostly from media
the neighboring town was once considered the epitomy of the wild west.
around the turn of the century the north side of main street was where everyday businesses were but the south side was full of bars/ bordellos and in the 70's the area had again become the slummy area lots of bars and adult businesses and the movie theatres had closed in the mid 60's and where reopened as adult theatres, people working the streets. the city described it as the den of iniquity and decided to demolish the south end of mainstreet to get rid of the existing businesses not a good move historically but it did clean up south mainstreet ,an applience store moved south and two antique stores opened up and the remaining 30's theatre reopened as a church for a while and is becoming a county museum

and as for the old homes their mostly doctors, lawyers offices,resteraunts.they seem to have break in issues off and on though so they can be acquired rather reasonably

 

[HudsonHawk]

My grandmother would have no truck with Baptists. At their merest mention she'd tell you about the girl she knew when she was young who got baptized in the Passagassawakeg River in March and died of pneumonia.

Growing up there were two major religions...Dunkers and Sprinklers. Or more correctly, Dunkers and Unwashed Infidels.

 

[HudsonHawk]

I started out as Roman Catholic and have been Presbyterian for well over 30 years. We like to say that a Presbyterian is a Methodist with a savings account... whereas an Episcopalian is a Presbyterian who manages to live well off of his investments.

Somewhere there's a joke that's punch line ends with something about "Episcopalians not recognizing the Pope and Baptists not recognizing each other in the liquor store". I wish I could remember it.

 

[ChiTownScion]

Somewhere there's a joke that's punch line ends with something about "Episcopalians not recognizing the Pope and Baptists not recognizing each other in the liquor store". I wish I could remember it.

I've also heard that an Episcopalian was a Catholic who had flunked Latin. That was never my problem. Terra, terrae, terrae, terram, terra....

 

[Inkstainedwretch]

My ancestral hometown, at least on my mother's side, was a very small south Texas town midway between San Antonio and Corpus Christi. Like so many Texas towns that sprang up in the 1880s-90s it was at a railroad junction. The tracks defined the two parts of town. One side was Anglo, the other side was Mexican. In the 50s when I lived there there were no hispanics or latinos. There were white people, colored people, and Mexicans. It was a farming and ranching community, with a few oil wells bringing in much-needed cash. The agriculture mostly collapsed n the late 40s "seven-year drouth." That's how they pronounced it in Texas, with a "th"on the end. The '30s had actually been pretty prosperous because of plentiful rain. In Texas and the southwest rain is everything. Flax was the major cash crop and when I was a boy there was still an annual Flax Fair and parade, though the drought had put a big dent in it.

The town began to die in the 60s. Most of the remaining population moved away from the railroad tracks to the nearby highway, leaving the old center of town desolate. I visited there in the 90s and the town I remembered was almost a ghost town. Most of the remaining population were Hispanic. My old theater, the Rialto, stood derelict for decades. It looked like the old town was going to crumble into the Texas dust like so many others.

Then came fracking. Suddenly, the old, pumped-out oil fields were worth millions. Workers began flooding in and continue to do so. The inhabitants who had managed to hang onto their water rights are millionaires now. Fracking demands huge amounts of water. The old theater is now the Rialto Apartments. They've kept the old marquee. so now the town is prosperous again until the next oil collapse and the old cycle will replay, maybe without end.