I certainly enjoy living in a small town in the shadow of a much larger, ever growing metropolitan area. I believe there are many reasons why people choose to live in small towns. Convenience certainly is not one of those reasons, as you still have to go somewhere else to shop for things you need on a daily basis, such as groceries, clothing, gasoline, tires, automobile insurance, and a multitude of other needs. People normally move to small towns because they find them to be safer and they like the comfort of knowing their neighbors better than those who live in larger towns might.
I have lived in towns of all sizes throughout my life, ranging from suburban Washington, D.C. to a small town in New Hampshire. Overall, I have to admit, Manitou Springs is probably the smallest small town I have ever lived in, but its proximity to Colorado Springs makes it different than other small towns I have lived in, as they have been stand-alone towns far removed from larger cities. I definitely prefer living in small towns to life in larger cities.
But, in all my years of living in small towns, I have always struggled with the bigger questions: Will small towns survive? Can small towns survive? Small towns all across America are slowly getting smaller and many are on the verge of completely disappearing. I was in Gallup, New Mexico not too long ago and saw so many boarded up businesses that I wondered how the town was surviving. Every small town I have ever lived in was full of so many businesses going under and houses up for sale that it boggles the mind. Vermont has reached the point where it is willing to pay people to move there and work remotely. From California to New York, the trend is continuing.
On a few acres of land in the New Mexico desert, near Socorro, scientists are listening deep into space, sifting the static, trying to find the origin and the end of the universe. The big white dishes of the radio antennas have the presence of a question mark.
Over 80 years ago in a small New Hampshire town, Thornton Wilder wrote the play “Our Town,” when the universe as we knew it was a smaller place, but the questions we all ask were just as large.
In the play, which takes place in the early days of the 20th century, Rebecca Gibbs tells her brother George about a letter she received from her minister addressed: Jane Crofut; the Crofut Farm; Grover’s Corners; Sutton County, New Hampshire; United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God.
The New England village of Grover’s Corners - although not real, but based on the actual town of Peterborough, New Hampshire - was nested securely in a series of ever-larger spheres.
In modern cosmology, the universe dances. Nothing is fixed. Time bends. The short history of our settlement here in America tells a similar story: a constant nervous migration. Many towns have been on the move most of their lives.
Open almost any guidebook or history book written in the last 150 years and you will find towns praised as “one of the most delightful prospects which this world can afford,” or as a place possessing the fitness and poise of a clipper ship, “the highest and choicest beauty.”
Such praise casts the town as a beauty-pageant winner, all dressed up with no place to go. The town is seen as a finished work. But, these towns, like all American places, are fluid and mercurial. Some were settled first on a hill, then moved down by the water to run the mills. When the railroad came, they followed the rails, and when the automobile came to rule, they slopped across the landscape in malls, condos and fast food joints. Indeed, now we lament regions about to be sold, to be swallowed into a sea of chain stores, national releases and nationwide hookups. And, we further lament as those same stores close in an economic crash and leave acres of wasted land covered by huge parking lots and decaying buildings.
Some towns were a small Pleiades, a cluster of a half-dozen little towns, which was soon eclipsed by a growing central town, which itself burned brightly until the auto age.
Other towns are the story of the rise and fall of one commodity: clothespins, rocking chairs, shoes, buggy whips. American places are often but a rumor of community wrapped around the commerce of the moment. Go a little way off the roads around here and you will find the cellar holes of farms and small villages that long ago failed.
To the many towns pursuing a revival, this history is like the old joke: the bad news is that these towns have changed and the good news is that they can change again. We are a restless people. We do not settle a place as much as we experiment with it.
Some towns are as imperiled as the family farm, as sitting down to dinner together with the family without appliances talking at you. Many beautiful, important places are being lost; a few will be saved. In my lifetime I have seen small towns crumble like a sand castle on the beach.
Tremendous forces are working against small towns. They are well documented: the car, the television, the video, the automatic teller machine, the entire growing electronic cocoon. We are more invisible to one another. Our inventions have atomizing effects and reinforce isolation. They celebrate individualism and starve the commons.
Every public policy we have set in place since World War II works against the town: the model zoning codes, the funding and building of the highways, the post office’s eagerness to move from town centers, the high prices for public parking, increasing rents. We have built a machine to create sprawl, and it is wickedly successful. We have taken our penchant for migration and magnified it a hundredfold. We love our cars and roads more than our public places.
Against these odds, people are working to save small towns. They are trying to stop sprawl and find a better way to build. Newcomers may not know the old ways and the old stories, but they do not know that things cannot be done. They take on the toughest challenges in partnership with the oldest residents.
The grace the guidebooks have spoken of is still there. The order and repose of many towns has survived. These towns are a story about that most un-American attribute: limits. They are built of a few simple materials, gathered in an ensemble about the streets and commons. Occasionally, however, you can see the dish in town poking up among the trees, moving on its quest. The Universe. The Mind of God.
That is how we live these days. A small town riding in a universe expanding, racing away from the first moment of time, to what?
The astronomers have their questions and we have ours. Will small towns survive? U.S. News and World Report recently listed the most endangered small towns in all 50 states, indicating that the trend is continuing. Even large cities, such as Detroit and Pittsburgh, have lost their glimmer. We may never find these answers in our lifetime, but when we do find them, the answers from both searches will be very big news.
Comments