Long Live America’s Small Towns

When my editor at Smithsonian asked me to address a adventure about “The 10 Best Baby Towns in America” for the magazine’s May issue, I didn’t apprehend an access of responses: Facebook “Likes” and “Tweets” in the tens of bags forth with hundreds of actual anxious e-mail comments, abounding of them from humans blessed to see their hometowns included.I aswell didn’t apprehend my research—hugely aided by Esri, a California-based geographic advice systems company—to bare towns of such broadly differing character.

Small boondocks meant just one affair to me: “Our Town,” the abode declared in Thornton Wilder’s archetypal American play as Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.Remember how it begins with the Stage Manager pointing out its capital street, drugstore, hitching posts and Congregational church? Later in Act I, the editor of the bounded bi-weekly makes his own assessment: Very accustomed town, if you ask me.Little bigger behaved than most.Probably a lot duller.But our adolescent humans assume to like it able-bodied enough: 90 percent of ’em admission from top academy achieve down appropriate actuality to live—even if they’ve been abroad to college.

There’s aswell an old James Taylor song I anticipate of: “Letter in the Mail,” about what’s happened to baby towns in the American hinterland as jobs dry up and humans leave them.

The First Congregational Abbey in Hancock, NH. (Image address of Susan Spano)

I assumption it never was abundant to attending at

Just a one-horse town

The affectionate of abode adolescent humans wish to leave today

Store fronts appealing abundant boarded-up

Main Artery appealing abundant closed-down

So, for me, it was an abrupt amusement to acquisition that lots of baby towns are advancing in means abrupt by the old model.Great Barrington, Massachusetts, for example, which claimed the top atom on our list, still evokes Grover’s Corners, with its white-steepled churches and doughnut bakeries.But you don’t accept to reside there to see that the boondocks has changed, affable new immigrant groups and advancing up with schemes like minting its own bounded bill to accumulate it vital.

My appointment to Naples, Florida, addition Smithsonian baby town, underscored the way abridgement drives culture.As a second-home ascendancy for retired CEOs, it has the acquirement to abutment a world-class symphony orchestra, art building and theaters.With cultural institutions like those, no one has to sit home at night watching absoluteness TV.

Gig Harbor, Washington, a alive fishing apple on the west bend of Puget Sound, was addition story, conceivably the atomic reconstituted boondocks on the list, which is in fact its best feature.But with outlanders advertent its charms—a picture-perfect anchorage and still almost affordable beach property, not to acknowledgment actual beginning fish—the boondocks finds itself in a ambiguous place.Its accomplishment to bang a antithesis amid absolution development in and blockage the aforementioned requires cerebration alfresco the box, attention a traditional, low-tech industry that could die out as added advantageous enterprises appear in.

In the end, autograph the adventure showed me that every little boondocks has its own distinctions, and challenges.No two are the aforementioned and there’s no individual decree for survival.I still dream about Grover’s Corners and can account any amount of New England towns that anamnesis it: bucolically admirable Cornwall Bridge on the Housatonic River in the northwest bend of Connecticut; Cohasset, Massachusetts, just south of Boston; Hancock, New Hampshire, congenital in 1779.

But in anniversary case, if you attending above the appealing picture, you acquisition a coil of alone dynamics: attention against bread-and-butter development, assets inequality, ecology protection, accessible armamentarium allotment—all apprenticed by humans with altered agendas, absorbed on autograph the continuing adventure of the abode area they live.

I’m a city-limits babe by nature, apt to aggrandize dots on the maps with names like Menomonie and Siloam Springs—long may they live, all of them “Our Town.”