What happened to small towns?

[BlueTrain]

I was about to make this post in that other thread that devolved into talking about development and whatnot and nothing about hats. Instead, I thought it might be a good topic for a fresh, new thread. It's probably been talked about before but not today.

The question is, or was, what happened to small towns. Lots of things, of course. Here is one thing that happened that tended to almost destroy small towns but in some ways, larger cities.

I could say that it was progress but that's too simplistic. But first it was something called a bypass, which ironically those who lived in small towns would have wanted. The main highway north-south or east-west typically ran right through the middle of town. It meant for awful traffic. So they built a new road that bypassed the main street. Both roads might even keep the same route number but the old one was styled "business." Then business, especially those devoted to travelers, moved out to the bypass. Then another bypass was built and the old bypass became "the strip." And all of that was before the interstates were built.

Then more progress happened. The interstates began to be finished and linked up. The whole town got bypassed. But in the city, building the interstate meant that whole parts of the city were divided by the new super highways and the later super dooper highways (I just made that up). And knowing how some neighborhoods have more pull than others, the new roads, which might cut a swath two blocks wide, tended to demolish the less well-off parts of town. But that's progress, partner!

There are other good reasons, too, no doubt.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Up here, the Interstate isn't a factor along the coast. Once you're north of Bath, Route 1 is two-lane traffic all the way to Calais. But you will hit bypasses in certain towns, all of which were built after the war in an effort to control the tourist traffic. The town next to where I grew up was bypassed in the mid-1960s to keep traffic bound for Bangor from clogging up the middle of the town, but within five years every business in the town had died leaving two rows of ghost buildings. It was eerie to go thru there and see the sudden desolation.

The town of Wiscasset, on the other hand, hasn't been bypassed despite decades of discussion of the idea. It remains the biggest bottleneck on Route 1 -- in the summer, at the height of tourist season, it might take you an hour to creep from the southern end of town to the end of the Sheepscot River bridge, a distance of maybe a half a mile.

An interesting exercise is to find an old AAA Green Book or ALA Blue Book for your part of the country. These "motoring manuals" were first published in the early 1920s, and contained detailed driving routes from point to point within each territory covered. You'll likely find that few of the routes listed can be navigated as written today.

Where I live now, the downtown area was turned into a network of one-way streets in the early 1950s as a way of controlling tourist traffic, but what it mostly does is confuse tourists. We have no Interstate access from here -- the nearest is about fifty miles away in any direction -- so you have to take Route 1 if you're passing thru on the way to Bar Harbor, and you better pay close attention to the road signs if you don't want to end up coming in where you should be going out.

 

[BlueTrain]

I was not actually thinking of my hometown when I wrote that but another one closer up here, Warrenton, Virginia. And when I was referring to how a new interstate or other multi-lane highway can cut a town or community in half and literally displace neighborhood, I was thinking of Arlington, Virginia, and of D.C. But that highway in this case was here when I got here in the 1970s. Mostly this happened years ago. Other things happen, too, of course.

While many areas, especially along the coasts, have grown, other places in the country, mainly rural have been bleeding population for 40 or 50 years. I wasn't really suggesting that interstate highways caused population changes in small towns, only that major relocation of highways and traffic have changed the business patterns in small towns. Other changes, like the so-called big box stores, have had a greater impact. The disruption caused by major highways construction, though, is probably felt more in built-up areas and is very real but that part eventually is forgotten. But such roads have been built in all of the more advanced countries, starting in Germany with the Autobahn. There's no turning back now.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Our population was nearly 10,000 in 1950. It's just a dite over 7000 now. Entire blocks full of houses, whole downtown neighborhoods, were bought up and demolished for parking lots in the 1970s, so part of the problem is simply that there's nowhere for people to live. It's getting worse now because of the gentrification -- you'll rarely find a dinky little house for rent for less than 900 a month, and even crummy apartments are going for 700 or more. Those numbers might sound good by big-city standards, but it's the rare and fortunate adult here who's making more than 11 or 12 dollars an hour -- and there's an awful lot of adults in the service sector making minimum wage. I know a lot of people in their thirties or forties living like college kids with three or four roommates because they can't afford a place of their own.

It's easy to say, "well, move somewhere else and make more money." But there comes a point when too many people do that and the town is no longer able to function as a town because there's nobody left to do the grunt work. Living outside of town and commuting might be workable in a big-city setting -- but here "commuting" doesn't mean hopping on the 7:05 from Massapequa, it means driving thirty miles or so each way on twisty two-lane, poorly-maintained, rarely-lit roads, regardless of snow or ice, where everything from flocks of wild turkeys to deer to moose can run out in front of you without warning at any moment, in a car which barely got thru inspection and could break down at any time. My mother was nearly killed "commuting." Some people *are* killed commuting.

So people give up on jobs "in town" and go somewhere else, and eventually you'll be left with a town full of "consultants," telecommuters, artists, and retirees wondering why it took so long to get help when they called for an ambulance. (We just this year had to cut three first-responders from our municipal budget, and there'll probably be more to come...)

 

[Paisley]

So people give up on jobs "in town" and go somewhere else, and eventually you'll be left with a town full of "consultants," telecommuters, artists, and retirees wondering why it took so long to get help when they called for an ambulance. (We just this year had to cut three first-responders from our municipal budget, and there'll probably be more to come...)

Some cities in California have purchased houses especially for their police officers to get some rest since some of them have to commute such a long way: the police officers can't afford anything in the cities they patrol, so they live an hour or two away.

Back in the 20s and 30s and 40s in Wyoming, the time and place where my parents and father's parents grew up, school teachers boarded with local families. That's how my dad's parents met--grandma married the son of the people she boarded with.

 

[LizzieMaine]

When I die, I've made arrangements, assuming my life insurance remains solvent, for my house to go to the theatre, on the condition that it be used as low-rent housing for the kids. It's not very big, but at least a couple of them could live here, and it's within walking distance of work.

 

[Stearmen]

The town my parents were born in has a population of as town puts it, "1700 good eggs and a few stinkers!" Not much smaller then when they left after WWII. It never seems to die, but doesn't really boom either. There is an exit off the highway and some truck stops, but not much else. As my father would say about a Saturday there, "watch the corn grow and the chrome rust!"

 

[Stearmen]

Did I mention, God I am glad they moved!

 

[2jakes]

When I die, I've made arrangements, assuming my life insurance remains solvent, for my house to go to the theatre, on the condition that it be used as low-rent housing for the kids. It's not very big, but at least a couple of them could live here, and it's within walking distance of work.

It speaks well for the character of these kids that you would do this.

My sincerest admiration for you LizzieMaine.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'd give them more if I could. One has already called dibs on my books, and I've been careful to point out to her the ones that are actually worth money.

 

[2jakes]

I'd give them more if I could. One has already called dibs on my books, and I've been careful to point out to her the ones that are actually worth money.

If no one has spoken yet, I’ll take dibs on the Westfield .
I’ll do the same with my Schwinn for you.
I’m a bit older & you’ll come out ahead.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Both my bikes are spoken for, the Westfield and the Schwinn Hollywood. I do look a little askance at the enthusiasm with which they're dividing up my stuff, but "Be Prepared" is always a good motto. I could drive into a flock of wild turkeys tomorrow, and that'd be all she wrote.

(One of the things you'll still find in small towns is a rather matter-of-fact attitude about such things.)

 

[Trenchfriend]

Free market-economy = frantic urbanization

Social market-economy = 30' s timefreeze

 

[HudsonHawk]

Both my bikes are spoken for, the Westfield and the Schwinn Hollywood. I do look a little askance at the enthusiasm with which they're dividing up my stuff, but "Be Prepared" is always a good motto. I could drive into a flock of wild turkeys tomorrow, and that'd be all she wrote.

(One of the things you'll still find in small towns is a rather matter-of-fact attitude about such things.)

Funny story about dividing up stuff: My brother in law's grandmother was getting older, and she lived in a big Victorian house, right in the middle of town. She had lots of stuff. So she decided she didn't want anyone fighting over it, so she put a piece of masking tape on everything and told people to write their names on it. She did this in her early 70s. On her 100th birthday, there was still cracking old masking tape on everything in her house, some with names of those who'd already passed on.

On a side note, when I was a kid I told my dad that all I really wanted was all his old bowling trophies. My sisters said I could have them.

 

[Joe50's]

in my area businesses were lost due to trying to bring in larger scale department stores and needing the space for the buildings and parking lots so a chunk of mainstreet was gutted which in the end went sour as the first macys and an 1800's block was demolished to make way for a failed mervyns which is now a tax free non profit charity store .
also during this time a mall was built in the next town over so woolworths jc penny and so forth left main street for the mall then the mall flooded and the businesses left. the city says its a lack of parking that caused mainstreets demise but there is certianly enough at the ugly 80's looking department store lot. they also lost a theatre venue by splitting thier 30's theatre into two builings and making the auditorium a 2 story business complex
also whenever they build a new building on mainstreet it always turns out rather modern and modular which sticks out against the turn of the century buildings. other towns i know have guidlines to what they will allow on mainstreet to go with the period of the buildings

 

[BlueTrain]

It is difficult to think of small towns without imagining them as pristine and well-managed with a gazebo in the park where the local brass band plays on Sunday afternoons and where there's nothing else to do but go listen to them. Rather like Avonlea and wherever Pollyanna lived. The world was perfect in, oh, 1910. If only we could make time stand still, like Brigadoon.

To some extent, things were really like that, although to say they were pristine would be pushing it. You also had to ignore that part of town on the other side of the tracks, too, and not let it get in the way of your civic pride. When was the last time you ever heard anyone mention civic pride?

A hundred years ago, or rather, 115 years ago was a time of growth of small towns in a lot of places. Big cities, too, but this is about small towns. And yes, a free market meant urbanization, frantic or not (boomtown, as we say), and a small town would have seemed very urban because it was. It was nothing like a suburb, which we like to dismiss as bedroom communities and which a lot of small towns have evolved into. A small town used to be a center of economic activity, just like larger towns and cities. Much production was still done in small workshops and mills. I was surprised to learn, and entirely by accident, of the extent of economic activity in West Virginia at one time. There were small factories and mills almost everywhere, it seemed. What I found was an on-line copy of some state labor statistics publication from the early 20th century. There were woolen mills, glass factories and all sorts of small shops. Most had few employees, though. But there were certainly large employers with big factories in some places (but not in West Virginia) but I was surprised at the detail in the book.

Some small towns, such as Ranson, West Virginia, were planned from the beginning as "industrial parks" where light industry could locate. Those businesses were saddle makers, wagon builders and the like. One might say that business model doesn't work anymore but out here where I work, there are lots of small business, although they aren't what drives the economy. They are what lives off the economy. Hersey, Pennsylvania, is another example of a purpose-built small town, although rather unique, to say the least.

I think most of these bustling small towns in 1910 were on the railroad, too, almost essential for prosperity--then. Some small towns were county seats, although in many places, the county seat might consist of little more than the courthouse, the jail, and a couple of houses, so they probably don't quality as a small town. Surrounding small towns would also have been little hamlets here and there but I suspect those became less important as centers of commerce the more the small towns grew. People did not patronize the village blacksmith the way they once did.

My home town has about 3,000 people in 1910 and about 6,000 now. But in 1960 the town was bursting at the seams with 8,400 inhabitants. The whole country never had more than about 75,000 people and that was in 1950. It's down to about 61,200 now.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Neither the town I grew up in nor the town I live in now were ever pristine. They were always hard-scrabblling industrial towns. My hometown was a center of shipbuilding in the 19th Century, and the second-largest deep water industrial port in the state for most of the 20th. The inhabitants were not Mayberry characters, they were sailors, fishermen, longshoremen -- and the women were even tougher. Where I live now was the headquarters of the New England lime industry during the 19th Century, inhabited by people who worked in quarries and kilns, and then during the 20th was the center of the state's commercial fishing and fish processing industry, along with shipbuilding and a range of other manufacturing, from precision parts to bathrobes. By the middle of the 20th Century it was known all over New England as a smelly, dirty, sweaty, two-fisted kind of town. *That's what a working New England town was like, and had always been like.*

The town where I grew up was always relatively self-sufficient -- it had a population around two thousand, but it had three downtown grocers, two hardware stores, a good clothing store, a bank, a drug store, a lunch room, seven gas stations, two heating oil dealers, a coal yard, a bunch of independent carpenters, electricians, and plumbers, a town doctor, a marine supply dealer, a dairy, and various other assorted small family enterprises to support the dockworkers, the railroad workers, the trucking-company workers, and their familes. You didn't have to leave town to go shopping for basic necessities unless you really wanted to -- but if you did, it was a just a six mile drive to a town with several five-and-ten stores, several clothing shops, and a good-sized discount department store.

That town was killed in the 70s and '80s by the collapse of the poultry industry, which shipped all its jobs South to save money and by the globalization of the shoe industry. My home town was overrun by the tourist trade in the '80s and '90s when the local museum began buying up every available storefront so as to ensure that every visitor had a chance to buy a t-shirt. Along with all that, the outastate retiree crowd began fighting every effort to expand the port to keep up with current demands, so as not to spoil their view. The port is still there but it might as well be on another planet for all the effort the people running the town now put into keeping it completely out of sight and mind.

Where I live now was always the county seat, and had all the trimmings -- a four-story downtown department store, two dime stores, several restaurants, a big downtown hardware store, half a dozen downtown drug stores, showrooms for all the major car makes, two theatres, and everything else a self-respecting county seat would offer. The little towns surrounding the city haven't really grown or changed much at all over the years -- none of them have much of anything to offer commercially except the occasional general store -- but the collapse of the fishing industry in the '80s and the coming of the big boxes in the '90s combined to deal our downtown a knockout blow. It was replaced by the tourist-oriented downtown we now have, where you have forty different places to buy art, and nowhere to buy a pair of cheap cotton underpants.

 

[BlueTrain]

Nice post. Sometimes the past isn't that pleasant to think about. You really lived in a small town. You hit on one point that I was trying to make, in that small towns were "self-sufficient." But only in one sense were they self-sufficient, in that they depended on trade or industry (or fishing) as the basis of the livelihood of the town. Someone even said that you only had farms when there were cities but I'm not so sure about that.

I think that another thing that happens when a town turns into a bedroom community and there ceases to be local businesses, including banks, is that there is no longer the sort of local civic leadership there used to be. You may not have liked your local banker in 1950 before it became part of a big bank and was reduced to being just the local branch but people like that surely took more interest in local affairs than the manager of the local Wal-Mart, although I might be kidding myself. Essentially the concentration of economic power somewhere else tends to destroy local control of anything. That isn't the intention of the big corporations but it's definitely a side-effect, I believe.

In your small town, who lives in the biggest and fanciest old house in town?

There was another kind of small town where I'm from that bears no resemblance to anything mentioned so far. They were called coal camps and during the boom times of the coal mining industry in southwestern Virginia and West Virginia and further to the west in Kentucky and Tennessee. Many have totally disappeared and you'd never know there was a town there at one time. In some places, there was a little town every three or four miles along the highway. Everything depended on the mines. When the mines, which are not inexhaustible, shut down, people had to leave. They were company towns, too, but with everything a small town might want, although that varied a lot. The center of the town was the company store, although other stores might exist, too. There might be a church and even a grade school. That was about it. They were dirty little places, too, because at the time, mining and processing coal produced a lot of dust and discarded material called slate or slag that was piled up somewhere near the mine. They were a part of history, along with all the other little company towns, logging camps, and western boomtowns (usually mining, too) that no one really is that nostalgic about. One by one, they've been disappearing for the last 40 years.

 

[Fading Fast]

My dad and his mother owned a small-appliance store (they sold small-appliances like clocks, radios, electric shavers, watches and some jewelry - not big stuff like washing machine, etc.) from the '20s -'60s (barely keeping it alive in the '30s - long story).

After WWII, business was good, not great, but good as they were on the main street in a small town that was a stop on the mainline of the Pennsylvania Railroad from Philadelphia to New York. My dad said as they built more highways outside the town, you could feel the business shift throughout the second half of the '50s as customers, commuters and other businesses slowly stopped coming to the town as some businesses started moving out. The car and the highway sucked the life out of the town.

By the early '60s, he knew, to survive, he had to move the business "out to the highway" as they said then (put in "a strip center" is what we'd say today) and upsize the business' square footage meaningfully. Owing to his concern about borrowing capital to make the move and his desire to get out of owning a retail business, he chose to shut it down.

The town continued to spiral down as more business left, less people commuted by train and new highways took away even more of the traffic flow. By the time I formed my first impressions of the town - in the late '60s when I was very young - it was, being kind, a dump of empty stores, dilapidate stores, unkept tenements and apartments with a general atmosphere of decay and low-grade crime that failing towns have.

I've seen pictures of the town prior to the '60s and, while not charming or idyllic, it had a healthy, liveliness about it - it looked like a busy town being a busy town. Maybe there were other forces at work, but my dad's impression - and he paid close attention at his livelihood was at stake - was that the building of highways and service road to the highways, which was entwined with the public's shift to individual car ownership and away from trains, buses (people without cars used to come into town by bus to shop), killed the town.

 

[LizzieMaine]

In your small town, who lives in the biggest and fanciest old house in town?

Tourists. Without exception, all those houses have long since been turned into "bed-and-breakfasts" or Ye Olde Quainte Neuw Englande Inns. That's not just true here, but all up and down the coast.

With all this forced quaintness, the working classes have been more and more marginalized in these towns, where they haven't been forced entirely out. With their jobs drying up and housing costs skyrocketing, a great many people here who used to earn a decent living fishing or packing fish have turned to drug dealing to survive -- it's very easy, if you own a fishing boat, to make a quick detour to New Bedford, Mass. and pick up a load of heroin for the distributors back home. That heroin has absolutely flooded the streets here since the '90s, and we have a major, I mean major, problem with drug addiction that shows no signs of going away anytime soon. The gentrification crowd pretends it isn't there, and the locals have learned to keep their heads down and just look the other way -- until it hits someone they love. Which happens more often with every passing year. Drugs are the vicious not-so-secret reality of too many small New England towns, and mine is one of the worst.