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ONE Here in the Middle Here in Smith County, at the exact geographic middle of the United States, there is a sense of timeless tranquility that can be deceptively seductive. Above the small stone monument that local citizens erected on April 25, 1941, to mark the site, an American flag waves serenely in the Kansas breeze. At one side, a few trees planted on that occasion shade a picnic table and a small white prayer chapel. Several tall pines and a row of overgrown junipers make a home for native jays. The grass has recently been cut, and the litter barrel is nearly empty. A few yards away is a low bluish-gray building that once served as an eight-room motel. Its doors and windows are now covered with plywood. A dirt road extends up over the hill and into the distance. Except for the rustle of wind, the day is palpably quiet. The location provides a commanding view of the surrounding countryside. To the north and west, a field of rich loam lies ready to be planted with sorghum. Down the hill to the east, an access road dips through a pasture in which a herd of Black Angus while away the warm spring days. To the south as far as the eye can see, across the gently rolling terrain, fallow land and sparse shelterbelts intersperse with fields of undulating wheat. In a few weeks, the fields will turn golden brown in anticipation of the harvest. Several miles in the distance is the small hamlet of Lebanon, its grain elevator and water tower rising tall against the cloudless sky. To the southwest, a grain elevator is barely visible on the horizon , and beyond that lies the town of Smith Center, the county seat. This is the heart of America’s heartland. Visitors travel to this spot to gauge the enduring values that define America. They come from Philadelphia and Chicago, from New York and Los Angeles, from bustling cities overrun with change and uncertainty, and increasingly from other countries. The sojourners detour up from Interstate 70 to break the long haul between Kansas City and Denver. They include hunters who come each fall in search of deer and pheasants. Some are writers sent by newspapers and television stations to record their observations for distant audiences. They are looking to plumb the nation’s soul. Perhaps there is wisdom here, extracted 8 | Chapter One from the soil by these folks who still live so close to it, that can inspire people elsewhere whose lifestyles are profoundly different. A writer in the early 1990s found the local residents compellingly honest, hardworking, sheltered, and a bit disappointed that progress had passed them by. A tourist from Minnesota came about the same time and stood at the grave of her great-grandmother, a rugged pioneer who struggled to establish a life on the open frontier. “We belong to each other,” she wept. A few years later, a reporter from Australia stopped on a cross-country tour with his eleven-yearold daughter to see if there was a connection between the landscape and the nation’s psyche. Truly this was God’s country, he concluded, observing the tiny prayer chapel and the church steeples and cemeteries. But it was an idealized past, he thought, a place with an uncertain future. At the turn of the millennium, a writer for the Washington Post spent the day in Lebanon, absorbed by its silence and overwhelmed by its emptiness. Main Street stays so vacant, he wrote, that “a dog could lie down in it for a long nap in no fear of being awakened, much less run over.” Standing amidst the crumbling storefronts, he was gripped by the melancholy of what had been lost. Yet he was equally impressed by the stubborn endurance of the people who remained. “It’s something you feel if you stop the car,” he mused, “get out, stand hip-deep and soaking in the pond of stillness that spreads without a ripple, mile on mile on mile.”1 It is hard not to conclude that America’s geographic center has seen better days. In 1870, three years before Lebanon became a town, only sixty-six settlers lived in all of Smith County. “We earnestly invite emigrants from the Eastern States,” one of the residents wrote in 1877, “energetic men and women who are not afraid to do or dare, ornaments to society and occupying useful positions in life.”2 By 1880...

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