She read 1,001 books and found the 'real America'

Esri map, from Esri, TomTom, Dept. of Commerce,
Census Bureau data

In 1968, Simon and Garfunkel released their song "America." Simon's lyrics wistfully recount his 5-day cross-country road trip longing for a way to explain America. The song is a pursuit of what it means to be American. But there are many ways to find America. . . .What about reading your way through American books to explain America? Susan Straight recounts her 5-year reading travels, "A map of 1,001 novels to show us where to find the real America," in her opinion for the Los Angeles Times.

"The idea for this 'library of America'  was born in 2016, when the news and the elections told of a country being irrevocably divided by politics, by ideas of red and blue, by arguments over who is American and who is not. . . . For me, those arguments ignored the vast geography of our stories and novels, the ways people search for belonging, leave home or stay, and how every state is really many places. Those arguments also ignored our common dreams, fears, challenges, hopes and everyday experiences, which unite us, regardless of where we live. I wanted to show that the places of American fiction can’t be divided into blue or red states. . . .

I made 1,001 books my goal, just as Scheherazade in The Arabian Nights told many stories to stay alive. Maybe these books can keep us going as we read about the places we or our parents came from, regions we don’t know, homes lived in decades or centuries ago, or homes made last year by someone new. Driftless, the region of Wisconsin in David Rhodes’ work, is a timeless evocation of a remote place that led me west, where two books set hundreds of years apart in Montana — James Welch’s Fools Crow and Stephen Graham Jones’ The Only Good Indians—kept me awake all night. Rereading Willa Cather in Nebraska took me to Pickard County Atlas by Chris Harding Thornton, a beautiful echo of homelands. In my California, the Central Valley of Helena Maria Viramontes’ Under the Feet of Jesus leads into the L.A. of The Tattooed Soldier by Héctor Tobar and the Pala Reservation of Gordon Lee Johnson’s Bird Songs Don’t Lie.

Even fictional books have a home. "Working with the story maps team at Esri, I drew all over my paper map, seeing regions emerge in the novels for each state. We ended up with 11 regions, chosen for spines of mountain ranges, shared coastlines, and prairie expanses. To find exact locations to map for each novel, I found references in the books themselves; I read interviews with authors throughout decades of their writing, and often — my favorite way — I contacted them by email or through Instagram and asked where they felt the exact heart of their books might be — especially in fictional places."

All in all, Straight distilled America to 11 kingdoms. Here are some of her recommendations:

Pointed Firs, Granite Coves and Revolution

Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island

The stony coasts and harbors of Indigenous and pilgrim, heritage stories both dark and bright in rock-lined fields, cobblestone streets and onyx rivers, this region’s novels are classic, but I love the new voices as well. Every fall, I visit New Brunswick, the land of my stepfather, then drive south, seeing New England through these remarkable books.

Mountain Home and Hollows, Smokies and Ozarks

Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania

With a series of wooded spines, the swath of America dominated by ridges and valleys holds unique stories of resilience, isolation and family, secrets held for centuries and brave travels to save those loved and loyal to this place. This kind of home means deep reverence for tradition and yet great novels of children longing for new visions as well.

Blues and Bayous, Deltas and Coasts

Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida

One of the richest legacies of fiction is here in eddies and waves, the desperate fields and dark roads to freedom, the tenacity of centuries and the swirl of change brought by bravery. In the South, the story is life, captured from the air into great literature.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

Wisconsin, Michigan, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio

I took this title from William Gass, whose rhythm repeats throughout this immense heartland, where I’ve been told secret histories that echo marvelous novels. I walk along cornfields where endless streams of blackbirds flow above, thinking that prairie turned to field, to town, to city, and yet the long-held heartaches and sly humor color this heartland.

High and Lonesome Songs: Prairies and Mountains

Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska

Yearly, I come here to hear stories from my long-gone grandmother’s people, secrets from Fraser mountains to desolate farmhouses in ghost towns like Purcell. These books immerse readers in centuries of beauty, movement and bone-hard work in this extraordinary place.

The essential geography of America in the books of my favorite contemporary writers is peopled by characters who speak Spanish, Tagalog, Vietnamese and more. They are filled with the vernaculars of place, where nothing is merely red or blue, solely political or always divided. This is, of course, true in life: Every neighborhood in America is a blending of stories that can’t be reduced to any single idea.

 

Rural Assembly sets online gathering Wednesday, June 28

The Daily Yonder

Rural Assembly Everywhere, the virtual gathering of the Rural Assembly, will feature conversations with rural leaders and allies, including Anderson Clayton, the youngest state political party leader in the nation.

Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic party, is one of several rural leaders and allies scheduled to be part of the free, virtual event from 1 to 3 p.m. ET Wednesday, June 28.

This year’s Everywhere is focused on rural people who are working toward safer, more connected communities. It is the fourth virtual event for the Rural Assembly, which has been hosting gatherings across the country since 2007.

Rural Assembly Everywhere will be broadcast via the Crowdcast platform. Attendees will be able to connect with one another before and during the broadcast through the event chat.

“Everywhere is the virtual analog to an in-person Rural Assembly,” said Rural Assembly Director Whitney Kimball Coe. “Even in a virtual space, we feel like we can create an experience that inspires and strengthens our connections to one another across Zip codes and culture.”

“The theme of ‘safer, more connected rural communities’ gives us an opportunity to explore how people and places are taking care of each other and affirming the dignity of one another–through arts and culture, policy advocacy, organizing and gathering, big and small acts of care. The stories from Everywhere remind us that rural people and places are extra and ordinary and essential to the future of our nation.”

The event will spotlight other rural voices through video stories and conversations:

• Appalachian author and Kentucky Poet Laureate Silas House in conversation with his friend the Rt. Rev. Brian Lee Cole, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of East Tennessee. House has written seven novels; his most recent, Lark Ascending, won the 2023 Southern Book Prize and the 2023 Nautilus Book Award. In 2022 he won the Duggins Prize, the nation's largest award for an LGBTQ writer.
• Highlander Center’s Ash-Lee Woodard Henderson and Allyn Maxfield-Steele will talk about the center’s work in the South.
• Sam Schimmel and Jonathan Blair, co-creators of a documentary-media and public-engagement initiative, "American Creed: Citizen Power," a follow-up to the 2018 documentary "American Creed" from Citizen Film – will discuss how they are working to build safer, more connected communities, the barriers they face, and their advice for other young rural community organizers.
• Stories from rural organizations and initiatives, including the Catwalk drag show in Fergus Falls, Minn.; Good Neighbor Missouri, Welcoming America, the Equal Justice Initiative, Main Street America, which helps revitalize older parts of small towns. and StrengthenND, which hekps nonprofits and rural communities in North Dakota.
• Artists Brett Hill, Eliza Blue, Cody & Alex, and Torrey McDowell will share stories and musical performances.

Registration for Everywhere is free. Visit www.ruralassembly.org/everywhere to register.

The Rural Assembly and The Daily Yonder are part of the Center for Rural Strategies.

Opinion: Some young people have 'realized that rural, and all that it entails, matters,' but farmers must be self-starters

By Peggy Sanders

If you put 100 people in a room, chances are 80 of them had grandparents who were farmers or ranchers and maybe 30 of their parents were. (These are my “statistics” so accuracy is not guaranteed.) There would be a slim chance that even one of these 100 people is a farmer or rancher now. Each farmer raises enough to feed 155 other people annually with only 1 percent of Americans in production agriculture.

Yet, there is a renewed sense of desire to get back to the land. Many people who have never set foot on a farm or ranch are getting the idea of an idyllic, easy life. Heck, all you have to do is get up, saddle your horse and ride. They watch too many movies.

Peggy Sanders

Notice that many of the present generation, the ones farthest removed from the farms and ranches now want to get back to the land. They are willing to lease instead of buy land, work a job or two in town, share crop, or whatever it takes to get started. Yes, they have fond memories of visiting the grandparents’ farms, but it is much more than that. This generation has realized that rural, and all that it entails, matters.

Only a country person can fully appreciate a homemade meal; not just home-cooked, but home raised. It can take at least 18 months to get that meal on the table, if you count the beef. A full summer is needed for the preparation of the sweet corn and tomatoes and watermelon that top off the meal. Maybe it’s the dirt under the fingernails that adds flavor, or the sweat from the brow; either way you look at it, anything you work for means more.

I have been corresponding with a city gal in an Eastern state who is soon going to marry a dairy farmer. She is just beginning to get an idea of the complexities of farming. The more she learns the more questions she has for me, a recovering dairy farmer, turned rancher. She has realized there are no eight-hour workdays on a farm. And that farmers and ranchers have to be so versatile. Yes, they have to be plumbers, electricians, mechanics, welders and truck drivers. In addition, they are accountants, purchasing agents, scientists, animal specialists and psychologists.

The recitation could go on for several paragraphs. At least the constant hat changes keep things from getting boring. Couple the variations of the job with the fluctuations of the weather to which agriculture is so closely tied, and you have weekly if not daily puzzles.

This gal has seen that like any self-employed person, ranchers and farmers have to be self-starters. Some folks who punch a time clock frequently comment about how nice it must be to be self-employed, to take days off whenever the whim strikes. The truth is most self-employed people work longer and harder at their jobs than the general population, a truth my new friend is appreciating more and more.

A national-award-winning columnist and an author, Peggy Sanders is part of a sixth-generation farm and ranch family in Fall River County, at the southwestern corner of South Dakota. If you are interested in publishing her columns, contact Al Cross at the Institute for Rural Journalism.

Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia wins Appalachian Studies Association award

Ginseng Diggers: A History of Root and Herb Gathering in Appalachia is the winner of this year's non-fiction Weatherford Award, given by Berea College and the Appalachian Studies Association. Author Luke Manget's debut book presents a new take on Appalachian history: "It is the first of its kind to unearth the unique relationship between Appalachia and the global trade of medicinal plants. This release provides an extensive addition to the understanding of land use and gathering commons, medicine, capitalism, and the beginnings of the pharmaceutical industry," the award announcement says.

It's an absorbing history of people and plant: "The harvesting of wild American ginseng (panax quinquefolium), the gnarled, aromatic herb known for its therapeutic and healing properties, is deeply established in North America and has played an especially vital role in the southern and central Appalachian Mountains. Traded through a trans-Pacific network that connected the region to East Asian markets, ginseng was but one of several medicinal Appalachian plants that entered international webs of exchange." Ginseng Diggers also received the 2023 James A. Duke Excellence in Botanical Literature Award in the Consumer/Popular Category. Luke Manget is an assistant professor of history at Dalton State College in Dalton, Ga.

Runners-up in the nonfiction category were Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore & Everyday Culture in Appalachia by Emily Hilliard, Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by Neema Avashia, and Something in These Hills: The Culture of Family Land in Southern Appalachia by John M. Coggeshall.

The fiction award goes to Barbara Kingsolver, author of Demon Copperhead. Beth Macy, author of "Dopesick," described this work: "Demon is a voice for the ages—akin to Huck Finn or Holden Caulfield—only even more resilient.” Fiction Finalists were Ashley Blooms for Where I Can’t Follow and Patricia Hudson for Traces: A Novel.

The Weatherford Awards honor books that “best illuminate the challenges, personalities, and unique qualities of the Appalachian South.” They commemorate W.D. Weatherford Sr., a pioneer and leading figure in Appalachian development, youth work, and race relations, and of his son, Willis D. Weatherford Jr., who was president of Berea.

America's beautiful but pothole-filled dirt roads and those who love them and hate them (sometimes secretly)

Riders on a dirt road in Chatham, New York. Heather Uhlar, right, who grew up in the area, started the Chatham Dirt Road Coalition, which has 1,300 members. (Photo by Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times)

Dirt roads are _______? A heritage. Cheap. Expensive. Distinctive. Able to remove transmissions. "For one town on the Hudson River, the soul of the place is found in its dirt roads. That is, unless you have to drive on them in bad weather," writes Jim Zarroli of The New York Times.

Chatham, N.Y., is part of the ongoing American argument over to maintain or to pave dirt roads. Zarroli presents Heather Uhlar, a dirt-road enthusiast, who "spent many happy hours riding her pony along the dirt roads . . . stopping here and there to swim in a creek or amble through rolling pastures flecked with asters and goldenrods. Even then, she understood that Chatham’s dirt roads were something wonderful." Uhlar told Zarroli, “I just always thought dirt roads gave our area character. They made us special.”

Uhlar was so dismayed when "some of the prettiest roads get paved over . . she helped start a nonprofit, the Chatham Dirt Road Coalition, which lobbies to promote an appreciation for dirt roads and slow the advance of the asphalt trucks." But not everyone is down with dirt. Jeff Antalek, Chatham’s road superintendent, told Zarroli, “I’ve never gotten a call from anybody that lives on a paved road that told me they want me to tear it up and turn it into an unpaved road." He lives on a dirst road, and "I have antique cars, and it’s a royal pain driving them in and out. They get dirty, even just sitting in my barn because of the dust off the road.”

"Not everyone shares Ms. Uhlar’s enthusiasm for dirt roads," Zarroli reports. "Unpaved byways are difficult to maintain and costlier in the long run than gravel; they are also muddy in ‌spring and dusty in ‌summer. . . . Coalition members don’t dispute that dirt roads are expensive and occasionally a nuisance. They simply agree that the hassle and extra cost to maintain them are well worth it."

John Wapner, a psychologist who lives in an 1852 farmhouse in Chatham, told Zarroli, "It’s different walking on a dirt road than it is walking on a macadam road. You can drive fast on asphalt, he said, but dirt roads force you to slow down, take in the scenery and enjoy the rural quiet. You notice things you wouldn’t have otherwise. It feels to me like you’re walking on the land, not over the land."

So far in Chatham, the push to pave has not won out over the charming heritage of dirt. "Partly for budget reasons, Chatham hasn’t embarked on a major paving project," Zarroli adds. "But some town officials privately acknowledge that the coalition’s efforts have also made them reluctant to broach the subject. . . . Of course, some people in town would love to see an asphalt truck come their way."

'Urban' now requires 5,000 people or 2,000 housing units; losing 'rural' designation could help some towns, hurt others

Gravette, Ark., pop. 3,547, was urban and is now rural.
(File photo by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette)

About 1,100 U.S. towns with 4.2 million residents are now classified as rural, not urban, because the Bureau of the Census has changed the criteria it uses to make those distinctions, as it does after each census. This change is the biggest since 1910, reports Mike Schneider of The Associated Press. 

"The new criteria raised the population threshold from 2,500 to 5,000 people and housing units were added to the definition," Schneider reports. "The change matters because rural and urban areas often qualify for different types of federal funding for transportation, housing, health care, education and agriculture,"The federal government doesn’t have a standard definition of urban or rural, but the Census Bureau’s definition often provides a baseline."

Mary Craigle, chief of Montana’s Research and Information Services Bureau, told AP, “Places that qualify as urban are eligible for transportation dollars that rural areas aren’t, and then rural areas are eligible for dollars that urban areas are not.”

The change reflects the reduced economic vitality and diversity of small towns. North Carolina State Demographer Michael Cline told AP that in 1910, a town with 2,500 people had many more goods and services than a typical town that size today, “and these new definitions acknowledge that.”

The Census Bureau had proposed raising the urban threshold to 10,000 but retreated in the face of opposition. The 5,000 threshold means that slightly, to 79.6% of the U.S. population is urban and 20.4% is rural. Under the old criterion, almost 81% was urban, Schneider reports.

UPDATE, Jan. 6: The bureau told Josh Zumbrun of The Wall Street Journal that its old 2,500 threshold was “the lowest in use among all federal agencies. We see the change in our minimum threshold as signifying that the Census Bureau is listening to stakeholders and feedback from other agencies and is matching the way others have characterized and classified settlement in the United States.” Zumbrun concluded, "The official rural population count has long been held down by an arbitrary definition. The country is more rural and small-town than we think."

This is the first time the bureau has used housing units to define urban areas. "A place can be considered urban if it has at least 2,000 housing units, based on the calculation that the average household has 2.5 people," Schneider reports. "Among the beneficiaries of using housing instead of people are resort towns in ski or beach destinations, or other places with lots of vacation homes, since they can qualify as urban based on the number of homes instead of full-time residents."

New podcast aims for 'a different discourse' about rural U.S.

(Photo by Judith Prins, Unsplashed)

There's a lot more to "rural" than row-crop farmers, shriveling towns and political conservatism. There are smart people raising the world's food, driving industry changes and finding ways to reinvigorate their hometowns. That spirit of growth and ingenuity is core to a new podcast from The Brookings Institution, "Reimagine Rural," reports Kristi Eaton of The Daily Yonder.

"The narrative that we often hear about rural America is one of decline or political divisions," podcast leader Tony Pipa, senior fellow at the institution's Center for Sustainable Development, told Eaton. "And to my mind, there is a lot of innovation, a lot of creativity, and a lot of people working together in rural America. We’re not hearing about that."

The first podcast episode presents Shamokin, Pennsylvania, a coal community where Pipa went to elementary school. He gave Eaton some highlights: “It’s a town that’s been on a long, slow, steady decline since the 1960s when anthracite coal left . . . However, through mine reclamation, they have pieced together 8,000 acres and turned it into a park for motorized vehicles like ATVs and motorcycles. . . . I was really looking for places where there’s forward momentum, and there’s a group of people who are working together to kind of create that vision and move forward. I wanted to show a diversity of places. And show off the diversity of rural America.”

The podcast offers examples of how rural communities can move forward. "Things need to start at the local level," Pipa told Eaton. "We have to be willing to be patient and invest patiently over time . . . include the role of the private sector as well as a theme around the sense of hope for the long haul."

The podcast hopes to catch the ears of policymakers. Pipa said, "I hope that sets us into a different discourse and dialogue, even politically, on what it means to be rural and the value that rural America provides to the United States as a whole."

Cutting rural losses helped Fetterman win Senate seat in Pennsylvania, and may have saved Senate for Democrats

Fetterman in Murrysville, pop. 20,000, in Westmoreland County, in early October. (N.Y. Times photo by Justin Merriman)

Democrats may maintain control of the U.S. Senate because their Pennsylvania nominee, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, campaigned in rural counties that he knew he would lose but that he thought would give him more of their vote than they gave President Biden two years ago. They did, and he won.

Fetterman used that strategy mainly in his home territory of southwestern Pennsylvania. That's what Jake Tapper and John King of CNN highlighted on their coverage of the race early this morning, citing three counties where Fetterman lost big -- but not as big as Biden did. He cut the losses.

"Winning, for him, is cutting the margins," King said. At 1:13 a.m., with Fetterman 2 percentage points ahead of Republican Mehmet Oz, CNN projected him the winner.

To many rural Democrats, Fetterman's victory will be a validation of what some of them have been saying for years, that their candidates can win rural votes if they will just show up and ask for them. The nation's leading urban Democrat, Barack Obama, said it more than 10 years ago.

"I never expected we would turn these red counties blue but we did what we needed to do, and we carried that conversation across every one of those counties, and that's why I'll be the next U.S. senator from Pennsylvania," Fetterman told supporters. The seat is held by Pat Toomey, a Republican who didn't seek re-election.

Pennsylvania was the main toss-up in Senate races Tuesday, and thus seen as the most likely decider of Senate control -- unless the race in Georgia goes to a runoff because neither candidate exceeds 50 percent of the vote. That seems likely; Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock is leading Republican Herschel Walker with 49.1% of the vote, with 95% of precincts counted. But if Democrats keep the seats they now have in Arizona, which looks likely, and Nevada, which is much less clear, the Georgia runoff won't matter.

To the west of Pennsylvania, in Ohio, Hillbilly Elegy author and Republican nominee J.D. Vance beat U.S. Rep. Tim Ryan to win the seat of retiring Sen. Rob Portman.

Nearly 40% of U.S. adults say they've not met a farmer; consumers say they want to learn about origins of their food

Almost 40 percent of U.S. adults have never met a farmer and 23% don't know where they could meet one, reports Spencer Chase for Agri-Pulse, citing a new study released by Land O' Lakes, an agricultural and food cooperative based in Minnesota. 

Many American consumers are eager to learn more about where their food comes from, a survey found: 87% were at least somewhat interested and over half were extremely or very interested, Chase reports. But many are unaware of how their food is produced and who is growing it. A vast majority of respondents didn't know the that average age of U.S. farmers is 60. In a press release, Land O' Lakes said many Americans believe less than half of their groceries come from family farms, but according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, nearly 88% come from family farms. 

Interest in origins of food was strongest among urban consumers; 68% said they had a heightened interest, Chase reports. Only half the rural respondents shared that same interest. Almost all of the respondents in the 1,000-person survey, conducted by Wakefield Research, said that it was "at least somewhat important that their food be grown or sourced sustainably," Chase writes. 

Growing up on a farm teaches children valuable life skills; don't hesitate to tout them when seeking scholarships

One of the writer's sons
working with a calf.

"Young people often don’t think of farm work as valuable experience, but it is. It shows they understand the value of hard work and responsibility," writes Lisa Foust Prater for Successful Farming, paraphrasing a neighbor who advised her three farming sons, to get her boys to talk about their farm duties as they applied for scholarships.

"When it came time for our older boys to apply for scholarships and jobs, they talked about managing their cattle herds, from doing daily chores to making business decisions," she writes.

In another Successful Farming piece praising childhood on a farm, Emma Henning details 15 things you learn growing up on a farm. Here are the first five:

1. You have endless opportunities for fun outside.
2. You learn responsibility at a young age.
3. You develop a strong work ethic.
4. Your siblings become your best friends. 
5. You come to understand life and death.

Hoping to attract digital nomads, some rural communities look to boost their image with a focus on branding

Some rural regions are trying to stand out by focusing on branding and marketing their assets, Caroline Tremblay reports for The Daily Yonder. The post-pandemic working culture has given many previously office-bound workers the ability to work from anywhere, and a reinvention of an overlooked place's image could make it an ideal landing spot for some.

A study by North Star Place Branding + Marketing "looked at American migration to small cities, finding that only 12% of respondents considered finding the right job their primary goal. Instead, 42% said their priority was finding a balance between the right job and place, while 46% placed the greatest importance on finding the right place to live," Tremblay reports.

Rural regions with aging populations and stagnant economies could get a boost from an influx of travelers. That's exactly what the Monadnock Region of southwest New Hampshire was hoping for when it contracted with North Star to help attract "young families, students, workers and tourists," the report stated. The branding company has already toured the region, met over 100 people and surveyed hundreds more and the new brand should debut this summer.

Minnesota is hoping to get a travel boost after the state government pushed money into a campaign to portray the state as the "Dream State." Leann Kispert, senior brand strategy manager for Explore Minnesota, a state organization looking to boost tourism, said focus groups identified "the ‘Dream State’ concept was the one that best captured the beauty of Minnesota and the magic of travel.” Data from Explore Minnesota's study of the rebranding has found “double-digit growth in our core metrics of favorability, consideration, and intent to travel within the next 12 months,” Kispert said.

Rural areas aren't going back to the way they were, so how do we hold on to what we have? So asks retired farm editor

By Mychal Wilmes

A ride along to purchase five Holstein bull calves from a dairy producer in southeastern Minnesota was welcome on a glorious late afternoon when the rolling hills best showed their beauty.

It is a strong dairy area, in contrast to the prairie that the calf buyer and I call home. Silos and barns — to an extent relics of a bygone time — remain in sharp contrast to the large dairy we stopped at. Truckloads of fresh-chopped alfalfa were being transported to the edge of a large pile, where it was packed tight by a four-wheel-drive tractor.

Along the way we talked about how vital dairy used to be across Minnesota. Local stores sold milking equipment and other supplies, and small towns were crowded with cars on weekend nights when checks were cashed, and families came to eat and be entertained.

West Concord (Wikipedia map)

West Concord — a town of less than 1,000 in the 1950s and now — once had a couple of tractor and car dealers, a clothing store, two hardware stores, two banks, a railroad line, and more. A mural painted on a building’s side depicts Mainstreet circa the 1950s.

It’s a shame, I said, that those days are no more.

“You can say it’s a shame," the pickup driver said, "but they are never going to come back."

There are many reasons why that is so: ease of transportation, technology, cost of living, efficiency of scale, and an unstopping exodus of people to metropolitan areas.

Keeping family farmers on the land has been the goal since President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal initiated the farm program framework in the Great Depression. Supply management through land banks and Conservation Reserve Program sign ups have been tried with mixed success ever since the government moved away from parity pricing formulas.

History suggests that the dominance of diversified farms blossomed only briefly. The driver raised a valid point when he said that we tend to remember the good times more than the bad. Cultivating row crops four times followed by whacking weeds, sick calves in pneumonia-filled barns, picking frozen silage from silo walls, and dealing with untiled fields was no one’s idea of fun.

Maybe a more reasonable goal is to hang on to what we have. It will not be easy. The public school closed in the early 1990s, and a start-up school that followed several years later folded. Three churches, hurt by declining attendance, have closed. The lone restaurant closed during the pandemic and won’t reopen in its wake. The American Legion, housed in a building constructed in the early 20th century, struggles for members.

Mychal Wilmes

The pickup driver asked and answered his own question: “Would your children want to move back here? No, they wouldn’t, because there is nothing to do here.’’

Well, that is not 100% true. There is much to be said for raising a family away from the busyness of a big city, the community that remains strong in its commitment to schools and other institutions.

The movement away from rural areas is a worldwide phenomenon unmatched in history. The slums of Third World nations are crowded with now-landless people. Europe and the United States are far better equipped to handle the migration as rural residents move for better opportunities.

Thomas Jefferson wrote centuries ago that the strength of American democracy is found in its millions of family farmers. It remains true to this day, which may explain why countless surveys find that support for family farmers remains strong.

Mychal Wilmes is the retired managing editor of Agri News. He lives in West Concord, Minnesota, with his wife, Kathy. This was first published on AgWeek.

James Fallows returns to smaller towns: 'The rest of the country is in trouble. In my town, we are working things out.'

Deborah Fallows in her hometown (Photo by James Fallows)

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

--T.S. Eliot, "Lttle Gidding," The Four Quartets, 1943

The boldfaced words in the penultimate stanza of Eliot's poem are the title of the latest post by James Fallows on Breaking the News, his Substack site. The subhead says, "Eliot wasn't writing about the Ohio of 2022. But he could have been." The post continues Fallows's and his wife Deborah's exploration of civic life in America's small towns, logged in their book, Our Towns: A journey into the heart of America. Here is the entire article, which is in the public domain.

By James Fallows

This post is about the challenge of knowing one’s own country—a challenge that is almost an impossibility for a country as large, diverse, contradictory, and rapidly changing as the United States. The same of course applies in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, “the Arab world,” and other places.

But what Americans “know” about this moment for their country seems skewed in ways that are dangerous and destructive—yet potentially correctable. I hope you will bear this dispatch in mind the next time you hear a report on “a nation on the cusp of civil war,” or “Red and Blue America, with no common ground in between.”

I’ll start by declaring my premises on three points. Then I’ll give a list of illustrations from the past seven days that my wife, Deb, and I recently spent in parts of America not usually covered in the news.

Three principles: Here are three points that guide what I write about America and the world.

1. Keeping contradictory truths in mind.

Through the years Deb and I were living in China, it would drive me crazy when experts would opine from afar on what was good or bad about the place. The certainty of their views and the sweep of their theories seemed directly connected to how little they’d seen of the country, except at some internationalized conference center in Beijing or Shanghai or Sanya.

By contrast, most reporters on-scene tried constantly to portray how China was both better and worse than it seemed from afar. Both stronger and weaker, both more likable and more off-putting, both more tender and more cruel. And that the main challenge in dealing with it was trying to keep these contradictions in mind. This is one of many reasons it’s bad for the world that Xi Jinping’s government is making it so hard for foreign reporters and foreigners in general to be inside China.

2. The arc of loss and rebirth—and how a culture stays ‘young’

Through the years I have lived in and studied American history, I’ve come to believe that the through-line in the nation’s story is constant loss, and constant creation.

The loss and change are certain: Name your decade since the 1620s, and I can name the emergency or tragedy of its times. Name your American family, and its background will include hardship and dislocation. Name your community, and it will have gone through significant ups and downs. For instance: Bend, Oregon, now one of the country’s most desirable locations, had some of the worst unemployment in the country 30-plus years ago, when the logging and timber industries collapsed. At about the same time, the now-celebrated Greenville, South Carolina, had a textile-based economy. Nearly all of those mills have disappeared, but Greenville has adjusted and prospered.

For arc-of-history purposes, the question is always how the creation in any given era balances against the destruction. Who is helped and hurt; how the gains offset the losses; who is able to recover; how to protect those who cannot. Change is a given; adjustment to change is the variable, and the one more within our control.

The older people become, the more likely they are to mourn how things “used to be.” The younger they are, by the calendar or in spirit, the more likely they are to think about what comes next.

When people say that America is a “young” country, this is what they mean. Despite having the oldest continuous form of government of any major country, and apart from immigration giving the U.S. a lower median age, what makes America young is an orientation ahead, rather than behind.

 
3. ‘The rest of the country is in trouble. In my town we are working things out.’

Through the decade in which Deb and I have reported on the goods and bads of smaller-town American life, we’ve become convinced that national media’s focus on “heartland” America mainly as an arena for Red-vs-Blue political showdowns (“guy in a diner”) has a profoundly distorting effect. As someone wrote about this problem:

"An important part of the face of modern America has slipped from people’s view, in a way that makes a big and destructive difference in the country’s public and economic life. Despite the economic crises of the preceding decade and the social tensions of which every American is aware, most parts of the United States that we visited have been doing better, in most ways, than most Americans realize. Because many people don’t know that, they’re inclined to view any local problems as symptoms of wider disasters, and to dismiss local successes as fortunate anomalies. They feel even angrier about the country’s challenges than they should, and even more fatalistic about the prospects of dealing with them."

As you’ve guessed, that someone is me, in the introduction to the book Our Towns. I wrote that four years ago; I am here to tell you that Deb and I believe this all the more strongly now than before the pandemic.

Because virtually the only thing Americans know about the parts of the country where they don’t live is the non-stop crisis narrative of national media, they naturally think the country’s problems are even worse than they are. In the parts of life they experience directly, people can see the goods and bads in perspective, and recognize not just possibilities for progress but encouraging practical steps. It’s hard to realize that all across the country, people who are never in the news are innovating and progressing in similar ways.

Now let’s make this specific.

Over a seven-day period this month, Deb and I interviewed and met people in six smallish, and very small, towns and villages in northwest Ohio. This is where Deb grew up, on the shores of Lake Erie, and where she considers herself “from.”

It’s also an area that, if it ever appears in the national news, is usually in the context of “despair and division in the heartland,” the latest Biden approval ratings, what the Vance-Ryan Senate race means for next year’s legislative agenda, and why Arizona and Nevada have become “swing states” but Ohio no longer is.

All those things matter.

But here are some of the other things that matter but are rarely if ever in the national news, and therefore are not part of general understanding of “how America is doing.” Each of these is a place marker for upcoming more detailed reports by Deb and me at the Our Towns site.

The community foundation. Findlay, Ohio, is the county seat of Hancock County, with a city population of more than 40,000. It’s the regional hub. Over the past three decades, the Findlay-Hancock County Community Foundation, headquartered there, has become a force in regional well-being whose effects can be compared to those of the great Gilded Age philanthropies in Pittsburgh. (Mellon, Frick, Carnegie, Heinz, etc.) Everywhere we went in the area we saw the Community Foundation’s imprint. What it has done deserves study and emulation.

As far as we can tell, this Community Foundation, which is transforming a region, has not been mentioned in mainstream national news.

Family Center. One of the Community Foundation’s projects in Findlay is the “Family Center,” in a former large grocery-store building on the north side of town. The insight behind this Center was the importance of combining a range of non-profit services—medical and dental clinics, housing and homelessness assistance, legal aid, a library, a food pantry and thrift shop, and more—all in one place. That way, as we heard, families for whom a $20 taxi ride was a decisive barrier could do all their business in one attractive and dignified place.

We have not seen anything like this in other cities. It’s a story worth learning from. Again, as far as we can tell, it has not been featured in the national news.

Sandusky on all cylinders. Sandusky is the county seat of Erie County, on the lake, and has a population of just over 25,000. More is going on there, in more different areas and directions, than I can even suggest at the moment. I’ll give just two illustrations.

First, we happened to be there at a moment when the national spotlight hit Sandusky. At an event on the waterfront, a trans-partisan group got together to announce good news on the “infrastructure unites us all” front. Rob Portman, the outgoing Republican senator from Ohio; Marcy Kaptur, the very Democratic representative from the district; and Pete Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend and now secretary of transportation, were on hand to celebrate Sandusky’s success in winning a competitive $25 million grant for local road, transit, and bike improvements.

From  left: Tom Horsman, City of Sandusky; Kha Bui, brewery owner;
City Manager Eric Wobser; James Fallows (Photo by Deb Fallows)

Second, one of the most impressive breweries-and-pubs you will find anyplace in America is in downtown Sandusky, founded by Kha Bui, who was born in Saigon, then left as a child on a boat into the South China Sea and spent several years in refugee camps. The brewery is called CLAG, and the adjoining restaurant/pub is called Small Cities. Each time we went near the place, it was packed. Kha Bui’s idea is to sell certain lines of his beer only at the taphouse and restaurant, so that people will have to come to Sandusky to get it. Again as far as we can tell, they have not been in the national news.

 
Sandusky, in perspective. When reporting from “they’ve already succeeded” towns, like Greenville or Bend or Burlington, Vermont, Deb and I often wondered what it would have been like to be there ten years earlier.

I think it would be like being in Sandusky now.

And this is not even to talk about the school system or the faith community. Or a new branch of Bowling Green State University. Or other aspects we will return to.

Villages, challenging what you think about small-town Ohio. One of the Community Foundation’s many projects in Hancock County has been supporting smaller villages’ enrollment in the Community Heart & Soul® process. (Heart & Soul has been a partner and supporter of Our Towns reporting.) The three villages we visited — village is the technical term — that had been through this process were really small. Mount Blanchard’s population is around 500. Arlington’s, about 1,500. And McComb’s, about 1,600 — though it also is home to the largest cookie-and-cracker factory in the country. That will be a story of its own.

Yet each of these communities, surrounded by corn and soybean farms, and with a population base smaller than an average city block in New York or Chicago, has engaged in a systematic civic-engagement process to help it identify what its residents most care about, and where it should invest its efforts.

Mount Blanchard discovered and rehabilitated old ball-playing fields that had been left neglected. It has better park facilities than most places with 20 times its population. Arlington has attracted young people back to town, and has ambitious retail and restaurant investments. (For instance, Hurdwell.) And in McComb, we met fully 1% of the town’s total population — the equivalent of 7,000 people in our current home town of Washington, D.C. — at a meeting to discuss already-approved plans to build more housing, and in-progress plans for a revived downtown. More on all of these to come. But in all of these tiny communities, we saw counter-examples to the idea that Americans no longer engage with their neighbors.

Vermilion, which is Deb’s homeland, has deliberately made the most of its assets, which are a lakeside setting and still-extant traditional architecture. Its streets, shops, and restaurants were jammed when we visited two days ago.

We didn’t ask any of these people in any of these places for their views of national politics. But in all of them, from the larger cities to the smallest settlements, people younger and older, Black and white, volunteered their optimism about prospects for their communities. In one of them, a civic leader took us through all the “used to be” sites — the gas station, the grocery store, the hardware store. “They’re all gone,” he said. “But I know that towns like this are coming back.”

Is this the full American story of these days? Of course not, and no one knows where these village-by-village ambitions will lead.

But it is part of the story, And part that is too often left out.

Quick hits: Apply for NPF awards; old buildings revived as arts spaces; rural LGBTQ adults face more challenges

Here's a roundup of stories with rural resonance; if you do or see similar work that should be shared on The Rural Blog, email us at heather.chapman@uky.edu.

In one rural Minnesota town, old buildings get new life as arts spaces. Read more here.

Southerly, a nonprofit newsroom that covers environmental issues in the South, is taking applications for paid 12-week remote community reporting fellowships. Read more here.

Dealing with dementia: Rural caregivers of dementia patients can apply for a free, six-week online workshop and university study that aims to teach participants new strategies for reducing stress, managing difficult behavior, better self-care, and planning for the future. Participants will be paid up to $80 for completing study surveys. Read more here.

Awards: The National Press Foundation is accepting entries for its 2022 awards honoring the best in journalism. Work published or broadcast between Sept. 30, 2021 and Sept. 30, 2022 is eligible. Of particular interest to rural and community journalists are the Innovative Storytelling Award and the Feddie Reporting Award for outstanding coverage of federal laws or regulations and their effect on local communities. Both awards have a prize of $5,000. Read more here.

More evidence of Army's lax attitude toward sexual assault: A first-of-its-kind analysis shows that Army soldiers are more likely to be locked up ahead of trial for drug offenses than for sexual assault under a system that gives commanders control over such decisions. But sexual assault defendants often threaten, hurt, or even kill their victims when allowed to go free before trial. Read more here.

Whoda thunk it? One of the oldest rodeos in America is in New Jersey. Read more here.

Rural LGBTQ adults are more likely than their urban counterparts to be depressed and/or anxious, and less likely to seek and find mental-health care. Read more here.

All the hogs in California: Delays in California pig welfare rules frustrate small hog farmers in other states, who will be affected by the fallout. Read more here.

Class comment: Dolly Parton once pushed back against being called a hillbilly, saying "We had a great deal of class." Read more here.

A new online platform tracks consumer opinions on meat. Read more here.

Dems need to compete harder in rural areas with candidates like congressman from Maine, Economist columnist says

As Democrats lost millions of rural voters in the last decade, "They took to lamenting Republican advantages in the electoral college and the Senate," writes James Bennet in his Lexington column on American politics for The Economist. "What Democrats have not done is compete harder. They instead condemn rural voters as mourning their white privilege in a diversifying country. Bennet, the first American to write the column, notes Hillary Clinton's and Barack Obama's lines at big-city fund-raisers about "deplorables" "clingers" to guns and religion.

Bennet has an example for Democrats to follow: Rep. Jared Golden of Maine's 2nd District, the second most rural in the nation. "The district tells the story of how Democrats lost their appeal to rural and working-class Americans, and with it at times majorities in Congress to match the party’s consistent majorities in the national vote. It also suggests how the Democrats might recover," with candidates like Golden, who is favored to win a third term in November.

Golden hates What's the Matter with Kansas, the 2004 book by Thomas Frank that argues rural Americans' vote on social issues at the expense of their self-interest. “No, people are not voting against their own self-interest. They know what’s important to them,” he said, while the Democratic Party “has developed too much of an attitude that anyone that disagrees with us is just not smart.”

This Marine vet of Afghan and Iraq "says he is a Democrat because he believes government has a critical role to play in helping people," Bennet writes. "But he thinks his party has taken a grandiose view of that role, alienating rural voters by trying to dictate national standards that ignore local realities—such as unrealistic credentials for day-care teachers—and wasting money on people who do not need it. He supports anti-poverty initiatives like the child tax credit, but was outraged that Democrats continued permitting it to couples earning as much as $400,000 a year. . . . Golden worries that Democrats think they can write off rural voters and rely on demographic change to supply majorities by turning more of America into Portland. 'I don’t know if that’s even true,' he says. 'Secondly, even if it is, don’t you just want to do right by everybody?'"

Golden and Bennet met in Skohegan, over a successful local beer made by a company that a teacher and millworker started in a barn; now they "are turning the idled mill in town into a brewpub, hotel and apartments. The brewers want to help clean up the Kennebec River," and they and and other local business people met with Golden that day. "Their excitement about the future of their pretty, faded town was infectious."

“I think my job is to try and connect them with as much help along the way or clear as many roadblocks as possible,” Golden told Bennet. “I think they want to believe in a government that will help them do those things. But they’re very skeptical of it.”

Bourbon boom has downsides for neighbors who don't want aging whiskey feeding unsightly fungus and posing risks

Buffalo Trace Distillery built these warehouses at Frankfort, prompting complaints from neighbors. Now it wants to build a similar group of warehouses in the nearby Elkhorn Creek valley. (Photos by Ryan C. Hermens, Lexington Herald-Leader)

Fungus on a nearby sign

The boom in bourbon has been a boon to Kentucky economically, but now rural residents in a swath of the western Bluegrass region are fighting the warehouses that turn whiskey into bourbon. They object to the fungus that is fed by the aging alcohol escaping into the air from barrels in the warehouses, worry about the storage of so much flammable material, and dislike what they call an industrial invasion of bucolic landscapes.

Residents of Henry, Franklin and Anderson counties point to the black fungus that is obvious on signs, homes and other surfaces. Distillers pooh-pooh those concerns, citing studies that show the fungus is harmless, but they acknowledge it's unsightly. And the concerns are more than cosmetic.

Wendell Berry

“What I fear is this will be a continuation of an old Kentucky story, in which outsiders come in, take as nearly as they can what they can, what they want, and give as little back as they possibly can,” farmer-author-poet-activist Wendell Berry, 88, told Janet Patton of the Lexington Herald-Leader. Near the farm where Berry grew up, Angel’s Envy has won Henry County Planning Commission approval to turn a 1,200-acre cattle farm into a "bourbon campus" with up to 25 warehouses, lodging, an amphitheater, a visitors center, a helicopter pad and more.

“We are being asked to sacrifice this land to tourism and whiskey,” Berry told the commission last month. The commission voted 6-3 for the zone change; the final decision is up to the county's legislative body, the Fiscal Court, on Sept. 20.

One the other side of the argument is "Connie Blackwell, a Lawrenceburg real estate agent who lives in Tyrone in the valley below the Wild Turkey distillery," Patton reports, quoting her about the fungus: “It is a mess; you do have to pressure-wash your house once a year. You get used to it. Everybody down here in Tyrone tolerates it. It’s just no big deal … for the taxes they bring into our county, it’s worth it, to me. . . . I don’t believe the whiskey fungus hurts us. Honest to god, for the amount of taxes . . . it really is a fair exchange.” But Patton notes that distillers are lobbying for the local tax on aging whiskey to be reduced, which would be the latest in a series of tax breaks that have helped fuel the boom.

'Dry' territory is becoming harder in find in rural Kentucky

Maps by Lexington Herald-Leader (bottom map by Jacob Latimer), adapted by The Rural Blog

Rural Kentucky continues to get wetter, and we're not talking about the weather. Only 10 counties are "dry," meaning that the sale of alcohol is illegal there, and they are all small, rural counties.

"Residents in several of those are trying to get enough signatures on petitions to call for a vote in November on whether to allow sales, according to information from the state Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control and local officials," reports Bill Estep, longtime rural reporter for the Lexington Herald-Leader. "A few counties have limited alcohol sales, such as at a golf course or farm winery, and there are a number of wet cities in otherwise dry counties, but the time when many Kentucky residents had to drive an hour or more to legally buy a 12-pack of beer or a bottle of whiskey is gone."

Why? The reasons "include economic concerns, efforts to boost tourism, generational shifts, people moving into rural Kentucky from places where alcohol has long been legal, changes in attitudes — including greater acceptance of alcohol among churchgoers — and even rising problems with other drugs such as methamphetamine and fentanyl," Estep writes. "There is still a great deal of addiction and other problems like fatal wrecks caused by alcohol, but rising overdose deaths from other drugs make it seem tame by comparison, said Gene Cole, a Baptist minister who heads the Kentucky League on Alcohol, Gambling Problems and Substance Use Disorder." Cole said the perception of alcohol is that “It’s not as bad as some of the other stuff out there.”

"Cole still preaches abstinence from alcohol, but acknowledged some pastors don’t push against alcohol as passionately as they once did, and that many churchgoers no longer see alcohol as evil because of the influence of popular culture and other factors," Estep reports. Nick Catron, director of missions for a regional association of Southern Baptist churches, said some have become complacent about alcohol: “As Baptists, predominantly we frown upon consumption of alcohol. But again, it just seems as if so many people today don’t find any fault in it.”

Economic concerns have been important, too, and a move on that front helped break down the cultural and social obstacles. In 2000, the legislature allowed local referenda to legalize alcohol sales at larger restaurants, golf courses and farm wineries. "Before that, voters had to choose whether to allow the full range of alcohol sales," Estep writes. "It was more than many could swallow, including people worried about liquor stores and bars changing the character of rural communities and small towns. . . . The momentum continued from there as people got used to the idea of having legal sales in their communities, with voters in several cities and counties first approving restaurant sales before voting later to go fully wet. . . . Legislators changed state law to allow votes on alcohol sales at smaller restaurants and dropped the requirement for a city to have at least 3,000 residents in order to hold a wet-dry vote."