Small Towns Are Evaporating

Not when you have broadband, beer and a bag of weed

 

That's not so much the case here in the northwest. I grew up in a smallish town and I've seen nothing but growth. The green spaces (orchards, vineyards, pastures, and forests) between all the towns in my county are dissolving. Now it's getting tough to tell when you left one town and entered another.

 

Thats only 3 of the 4 essential food groups

That 4th one, in your case, rhymes with gussy ....and small towns have a critical undersupply

 

And an abundance of sheep

 

LOLz

 

i grew up in a small town surrounded by other small towns, divided by miles of farmland in between. basically, that whole area has not changed at all since i was a kid. the biggest town in the area has grown, mostly because it's the next stop on the highway from a huge tourist area. everything else is what it has always been though.

currently, i live in a small city surrounded by smallish towns. they are evaporating, in that all the industrial jobs are slowly leaving (actually most of them quickly left 30 years ago, and the rest are dropping away one by one), and the populations are all lowering. but the OP's description of chain businesses taking over is the opposite of what's happening here. most of the chains are gone, and we're just left with the people that have too much local pride to give up on trying to start businesses that are doomed to fail.

in my experience, small towns are kind of like a clique. if you've been in that small town for at least a couple generations, people will do anything for you. but anyone else is kind of an outsider, and while people aren't exactly un-nice to them, they never reach that stereotypical small town niceness either.

 

Bloody city slickers! What're you doin' 'round here? We don't like your kind boy, do I make myself clear? You'd better take your earring back where you belong. We don't like your kind, so you'd better move on.

 

An old county road runs by my house and it ends on the river bank. In '73 they shut the ferry down. Back up the road is a church and a store with a bench full of lying old men, in the middle of a wide spot they call town. And I'm just a young girl living to make me old, plowing these fields by the river road where hopes, dreams and a my grandaddy lived and died. the fields run as far as my eyes can see but I know it ain't enough for me when I drive to the river and I look at the other side.

I'd like to find a long stretch of black tar where there are no dead end signs and leave these fences, fields and farms behind. There's a bigger town on a bigger road. Fame and fortune I've been told and I'll cross that river and search until I find it. I think I'll shake my fathers hand and head off to find the promised land and I hope to bring him back a little gold. And even though his dream was the same as mine, but it got lost somewhere in time, in a dusty field along that river road.

Me and this road, we ain't been nowhere. As far as I know this whole world is just a county fair. But somewhere there's a bridge that'll take me outta here, as free as the river flows me and this road..

 

I highly encourage this life path for you. Ideally to a town without an ISP.

 

I don't even live near a small town....

 

I grew up in the suburbs with tree-lined streets and while it did have a small town appeal with an A&P Supermarket and an F. W. Woolworth's in the town center, it also supported a population of 75,000. Mostly upper-middle class.


Hotwater

 

you'll still have to drive to the city to get decent beer.

 

reminds me of when slick willy was running for president. they were spitting out all the jobs created under his time as governor. it was an impressive number to me at the time. but it turned out that 90% of those jobs were walmart jobs.

 

i could make my own, but i still will make the trip to the city and its worth it every time.

 

Most small towns were established around agriculture and since the small farmers are slowly becoming a thing of the past so are small towns. No employment tends to make for a ghost town.

 

Small town culture, I imagine, disappeared with the widespread accessibility of the internet. The small, strange places disappeared as they obtained free access to global media. They retain some of their quirky charm, but I think the wide availability of mainstream society must have spread an indelible change.

 

A little craft beer bar just opened up in a small town near me. Its actually pretty amazing, this is the type of town that turns into a ghost town after 6 pm but now when you drive through you can see hipsters hanging out until 2 am!

Another small town that looks pretty much like this one but is about 30 minutes away from it, reinvented itself the same way but on a larger scale. A few years ago it was mostly boarded up store fronts but then they built a rails to trail that connects it with a larger city about 20 minutes away by car, only an hour away by bike using the trail. And now it is filled with craft beer bars and decent restaurants and art galleries. And bikers who insist on using the road even though there's a whole fucking trail just for them, but whatever.

Most of the small towns in this immediate area have reinvented themselves like that, but this area really wasn't bothered by the recession. We have the highest concentration of foreign investment in the country per capita so what we lost in American manufacturing we gained in French and German companies.

But travel 30 -45 minutes away to more rural parts of the state and the small towns are dying.

I didn't mean to ramble on, I origfinally just intended to say fuck small town living if you have to drive 45 minutes just to find something besides Budweiser.

 

budweiser? that fancy pants hipster shit? real small town 'mericans drink busch light.

 

maybe you're right,free me..but...I have been in places..where internet has still not been...how about a little mountain stream in Norway?or a lonely forgotten lake in Finland?I've been in small towns in my life where Jezus Christ never set foot..it's NOT about the internet,you know...it's about 100% plain nature..not everyone got a smartphone...or connects to internet...allright,you do..i do..everyone else does?I recall my 60 and 70's days,free me==no cellphones,no internet..and hey..just believe me==we still reached out...to eachother..when it was a must...