Filed under: Food, faith and our future
If you grew up in rural America, you likely remember all the little towns that used to be within a few miles of your home. For Mary and I here in northeast Iowa, those towns were Klinger, Horton, Cleves, Hanover, Bee and many others. They are all but gone today.
The very fabric of America was built on the communities these towns and villages built and supported.
I recently accepted a job from our local newspaper group here in southeast Minnesota. What follows is a recent article setting the stage for this discussion on locally sustained communities.
Jeff
The Decline of Rural America
Within a few miles of our own homes are places that used to be self-supported communities serving a larger rural community within a few miles of the village borders. Names like Yucatan, Sheldon, Bee, Black Hammer, Isinhours, Henrytown, Newburg, Whalan and Amherst resonate with a homey familiarity, but we know little of those once vital communities other than they are virtual ghost towns today.
Most of these towns revolved around a core group of small businesses – a tavern, a general store, post office, a gas station, one or more churches, and a school. More often than not, the general store served as a gas station, feed store and hardware store as well. The population of the town was basically comprised of those individuals who owned and operated the businesses. But the outreach of these communities served all the local farmers. The churches and the general store were the social hub and the center of the network that supported the local economy. In an almost Waltonesque scenario, the general store owner knew everyone within his customer base. The teacher or teachers at the school knew and taught successive generations within the same classroom walls for decades. The simple fact is everyone knew everyone else and they worked toward the unified goal of making a life for their family and their community.
There was a time, before the interstate highways and roads designed to take us around those little towns instead of through them, when one could pass through a little town or village every four or five miles. Why were there so many of them? The answer lies in simple practicality.
Travel in those days was limited to horseback, horse and wagon or even simply walking. A distance of four or five miles by wagon would take only a few hours, certainly not an entire day. The eggs could be gathered, the cows could be milked, the butter churned and the bread would be baked early in the morning. Those goods could then be taken to the local general store and put on account to be traded for coffee, flour, sugar – all the items necessary for survival. It was a ritual repeated every day by the people who lived within that network. It was the general store owner who was responsible for procuring the staples, the hardware, the seed and feed, all the commodities from larger communities like Rochester or even Chicago. Some of these small towns were lucky enough to be located on rail lines and could receive goods from all over the country. But all the commerce originated in the rural village. Soon the orders placed by the little general store increased and that led to the creation of larger stores in what would become larger communities like Mabel, Preston, Chatfield and Spring Grove nearby. Products could be obtained quicker because they were closer. As demand increased, business in these local networks increased exponentially.
Ironically, it was the perceived success of this system that would lead to its eventual demise. Farmers and merchants would become more mobile with the advent of affordable automobiles and pick-ups. They could go further, faster and obtain the things they needed without having to order them from the local merchants. Economic expansion continued as people went further and further out to make their purchases. But the expansion had to keep feeding on something…it fed on itself. Soon, the dime stores and hardware stores and grocery stores that proliferated in Mabel, Preston and Spring Grove would close their doors because people started going to the malls hosting the big discount chains.
I am lucky to be old enough to remember seeing this flawless economic system in action. When I was visiting my grandparents near Ackley, Iowa many years ago, one of my chores was to help grandma gather the eggs. We would go out to the hen house and reach beneath the hens as they sat on their nests and remove the fresh eggs to a yellow wire basket. Once gathered, we took the eggs to the basement and candled each and every one of them. Then they were washed, sorted and carefully placed on flats to be picked up by the “egg man” in the morning. There was always two, three or more dozen fresh eggs reserved to be taken to a little town (Cleves) a couple of miles down the road. I looked forward to those trips to the little store in Cleves with (almost) the same excitement I reserved for Christmas morning.
Grandma left her eggs with the store owner behind the big glass counter filled with penny candy and other such temptations that would occupy the imagination of a six-year-old boy. He would add the eggs to her account and she would peruse the latest catalog from a supplier in Minneapolis. After a few moments, she’d look up and say to me, “Just a few more mornings of picking eggs and we’ll have enough to get Grandpa a new watch for his birthday.”
That was the system when it worked without feeding on the people who labored to make it work.
