Small Town

IX: The Future of the Town

The people of Roxborough frequently say—Stan Cutter with enthusiasm, most others with regret—that the town is going back to forest. It is one of the Roxborough stereotypes, this conviction that more and more houses will be abandoned and more and more land yielded to brush and woods. Yet most persons are planning their lives on the assumption that the town will remain unchanged, and there are even some optimists who predict a bright new era of prosperity. Has Roxborough a future? Has any small town a future in this age of industrialism, urbanism, and specialization? The problem of the American small town in general and the problem of Roxborough in particular cannot be precisely identi- fied, for Roxborough is a rather special kind of small town. In the West or the South a town of Roxborough’s size is likely to be the largest community in a considerable area—perhaps in a whole county. James West’s Plainville, somewhere in the Ozarks, is the trading center of a region twenty miles long and eight miles wide, and it has four grocery stores, two restaurants, two drugstores , a hardware store, a produce house, a jeweler, a cobbler, two barbers, an undertaker, a blacksmith, and a number of filling stations. The village of Irwin, Iowa, has a large new school, a movie house (open once a week), and a bank.1 Th e F u t u r e o f t h e To w n ix 1 See Plainville, U.S.A., by James West (New York, 1945) and Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community: Irwin, Iowa, by Edward O. Moe and Carl Cr. Taylor (Rural Life Studies: #5, Bureau of Agricultural Economics, Washington, 1942). The population of Plainville is given as 275, that of Irwin as 345. However, Plainville and Irwin are villages, whereas Roxborough is a township. If Roxborough were regarded simply as the center of the town, or if Plainville and Irwin were given the same area as Roxborough, it is probable that the three towns would have much the same population. Whereas Roxborough is only fifteen miles from Troy, Irwin is sixty miles from Omaha, and Plainville is seventy miles from the nearest city of any size. Plainville is the next to the largest town in the county, and Irwin is one of the major centers of trade in its area. Roxborough, on the other hand, is the smallest of fourteen towns in the county. None of the towns is more than twenty-five miles distant from a sizable city, and only one is a shopping center for people from other communities. The town of Warsaw, for instance, has a population of 1400, and, like Irwin, has a bank, a school, and a once-a-week movie. In preautomobile days it was even more isolated than Roxborough, but today its people look to Troy, and its institutions have taken on a semi-suburban aspect. I became acutely conscious of the difference between a population of eight hundred in the Northeast and a population of eight hundred elsewhere when I visited the Tennessee Valley in the spring of 1945. In the 125 miles that I traveled by bus between Nashville and Clifton, I passed through only three towns that were recognizable as such. Clifton is forty miles from the nearest city of any size and more than a hundred miles from any metropolis . Although well-to-do persons in Clifton frequently visit Nashville and Memphis, many of Clifton’s people have never been farther away than Waynesboro, the only slightly larger county seat. Clifton is like Roxborough in never having had a railroad, but it does have the Tennessee River, and in earlier days it was a shipping center of some importance. At the turn of the century, the town’s octogenarian banker told me, seven boats arrived each week, and people drove in for supplies from as much as forty miles away. Lumber was the region’s principal resource, and the banker said he had seen 100,000 ties piled along the riverbank. Lumbering was still a major industry in 1945, but the best of the timberland had been cut off, and it was obvious that only a wise conservation policy could keep the industry going. The future of cotton appeared to be even more dubious, and the blight of tenant farming was apparent in the agriculture of the whole district. At first glance Clifton seemed to me in a more advanced state s...