The Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore

"Everything is rosy in Rosebud." insists the official slogan of Rosebud, Texas--and the town newspaper proclaims it in each weekly issue. But Rosebud is really rotting. Along the main street, a dozen business places have shut up shop; the owners of many others would gladly sell out if there were any buyers around. A longtime Rosebud resident, Mrs. Howard Linn, recently showed a trace of the old "everything is rosy" spirit. "We've got a brand-new rest home," she said. "We've got two good hospitals. We've got two good funeral homes, one of them remodeled last year." Then she saw the drift of what she was saying. "Yes," she admitted. "It's a dead town. We know it."

Rosebud is just one among hundreds of similar towns, for across the U.S. the small town as such is dying. Only a few years ago, Niland, Calif., proudly called itself "The Winter Tomato Capital of the World." But Mexican growers, using cheap labor, invaded the U.S. winter tomato market, and Niland's prosperity collapsed. Since 1956 the number of tomato growers in the area has plunged from 300 to 28. Cars, trucks and farm equipment were abandoned by their owners, are now rusting into worthless junk. One of Niland's remaining tomato farmers recalls that during the peak of the season he used to put $20,000 a week into the bank. Now, even the bank is closed.

Going Nowhere. The towns most vulnerable to devastating declines are those that, like Niland, depend upon a single basic source of income. The classic case is the mining community whose veins of ore play out. Although Arizona is booming, and the population of Phoenix has quadrupled during the past ten years, at the edge of the once bustling Arizona copper town of Jerome* stands a sign proclaiming it a ghost town (see cut).

For many a little town across the U.S., the basic economic resource was the railroad. Competition from trucks has made short-haul, small-load freight uneconomic for railroads, and many small-town stops have been abandoned. The Central of Georgia used to stop at Coffee Springs, Ala., and the town made a living by ginning and shipping cotton. But the railroad ripped out the tracks that ran through Coffee Springs, and today weeds grow in what used to be busy streets. "We're going nowhere," says a longtime Coffee Springs resident. "There's nowhere we want to go." Similarly, the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad drastically curtailed service to New Ulm, Texas. The town, which once had 800 residents, now has only 350. Says George Miete, owner of a butcher shop: "Doctor died in 1950, haven't been able to get a replacement. Barber died three years ago. Can't get a new one to come in."

Still Breathing. Hard hit, too, are towns that depended on farming for their livelihood--selling goods to farmers and handling farm products on their way to urban markets. The emergence of large-scale, highly mechanized farming has decreased the number of farmers. And the ever expanding network of highways has made it possible for farm goods in trucks and farmers in automobiles to bypass formerly flourishing small towns.

There is life in some small towns yet. Attracted by the concentration of scientific and technical brains in the Boston area, the electronics industry has brought an economic revival to many Massachusetts towns stricken by loss of textile plants. The highways that cripple some small towns can help others; many a little town, rescued from decay by a new highway, now makes a living catering to motorists instead of farmers or miners. And highways often make it possible for residents of a small town to get to and from new jobs in another, larger town. A few years ago, Adams, Mass., appeared to be doomed by loss of textile mills, but enough townsmen found jobs at the General Electric plant in Pittsfield, 14 miles away, to keep Adams alive.

Thinking Big. Sometimes civic leadership and gung-ho spirit revive a dying place. The population of Clarksville, Mo., declined from 800 in 1940 to 338 in 1960. The town had no doctor or dentist. Three out of every four youngsters in each new crop of high school graduates departed for more promising places. But under the leadership of a local automobile dealer, Milton Duvall, a group of townspeople formed a development corporation with capital of $132,000. Its first project was a $50,000 medical center; dedicated in mid-1961, it quickly attracted a doctor and a dentist. Since then Clarksville has started building an industrial park, improved its transportation facilities and its water supply. Today a $300,000 clothing plant is under construction, several small businesses have opened, and the population has grown to more than 900.

Such bootstrap improvement is not always possible, for many towns are simply too small, too poor, and too far gone. As some experts see it, the answer is for small towns to join together in larger economic and administrative units. Working together, several neighboring small towns could provide schools and other public facilities that they could not otherwise afford; instead of competing with one another for new industries, they could work out joint development plans.

One way or another, whether they wither away, become dormitories in suburbia or merge with neighboring communities, the small towns of old are vanishing, and with them will vanish one dimension of the nation's life. The small town had its defects as a place to live in, and urban Americans who know it only from the pages of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson and other look-back-in-disgust fiction-eers are likely to think of the small town only as narrow, ingrown, stunting. But for many, life there had its compensations --countryside within walking distance, acquaintances rather than hurrying strangers on the streets, and a serenity that city dwellers cannot even imagine.

* Named after a 19th century New York financier, Eugene Jerome, whose cousin Jennie was the mother of Winston Churchill.

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