The Reinvention of Small-Town America

In 2012, James and Deborah Fallows embarked on a journey in their single-engine Cirrus SR22 to explore American life on roads less traveled. Over five years and 100,000 miles later, the husband-and-wife team had flown to dozens of towns and cities across the country, listening to residents beaming with civic pride and witnessing firsthand evidence of economic reinvention. Their journey evolved into Our Towns: A 100,000 Mile Journey Into the Heart of America, a book that examines everything that’s going right in the country.
Exploring places that, on their surface, seem to have more differences than commonalities — Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Eastport, Maine; Allentown, Pennsylvania; and San Bernardino, California, are just a few — the Fallows unearth stories of resilience and creative pursuit.
These towns and cities are not places that pop up on many travel itineraries — which is why they are so often overlooked, James Fallows, a longtime national correspondent for The Atlantic, told NationSwell during a recent conversation. It doesn’t help that the opioid crisis looms large in many economically depressed areas, overwhelming any positive news that might otherwise register on a national scale. But many of these places are not just surviving; they’re thriving, say the Fallowses. While the national narrative has tilted toward chaos over the past few years, Our Towns can be read as a kind of corrective to the pessimism that currently pervades much of American society.
“I think it’s an actual struggle for the future of the country, between everything that is poisonous at the national level and everything that is potentially renewed and healthy at the local level,” James Fallows says. “And we think it matters to have these people who are doing ambitious things locally be known about, and be connected with one another too.”
NationSwell: Why did you choose the places you visited? And why not a city like Detroit, which has become something of a poster child for urban renewal?
James Fallows: So Detroit obviously has been on our mind because it’s such a classic case. There has been a fair amount of attention on the Detroit story, and we were looking generally for smaller places. And I say “smaller” rather than “small” partly because we went to a few biggish places like Columbus, Ohio, which is huge, and Pittsburgh, which is significant. But mainly the criteria was, places that weren’t getting much normal media attention, where they’d only be covered if there were some kind of disaster or a political race.

Small towns 2
For their cross-country tour, James and Deborah Fallows visited small towns that have been left out of the media narrative.

We were also looking for [places where] there was some kind of challenge and response; where there was something that was illustrative one way or the other about how the city was doing. We went to different parts of the country and different sizes of cities and saw different racial mixes and different degrees of economic recovery. This wasn’t meant to be scientific in any way, but I feel as if in the end it became representative.
NationSwell: Was it pretty easy to get people to talk to you? Did you encounter any suspicion about what you were doing?
Fallows: Even though I’ve worked for The Atlantic forever, both Deb and I think of ourselves as being small-town people. Many places were sort of similar to where we thought of ourselves as being from, so I think it wasn’t, “We are here from the big city to examine you as specimens.” Rather it was, “Hmm, this looks familiar. Tell us how it works.”
Also, we were not going there saying, “Why did you vote for Trump? What do you think about Obama? Are you a racist?” It was essentially, “What’s happening here? Are the kids moving in, or are they moving out? How does this school work? Is this business going to fly?” We never ask people about national politics, mainly because our experience was once you do, the results are never interesting. It’s going to be just like turning on the TV.
NationSwell: True. You don’t pass judgment on anything you learn, either, even when it’s kind of jarring, like when you talk about the giant pig slaughterhouse in Sioux Falls, or shipping pregnant cows to Turkey from Eastport. Is it ever hard to be neutral?
Fallows: For anybody who eats meat, it’s part of what things are. I am not a vegetarian and so therefore implicitly I endorse the existence of slaughterhouses. It’s been this really central, but also changing, part of the fabric of Sioux Falls. That’s where the Eastern European immigrants worked a hundred years ago, and then it had a sort of good job, union wage, and now it’s where all these Muslim immigrants are killing pigs. It really is surreal.
Small towns 3
The Fallowses point to innovation in K-12 education as a bright spot in small towns across the U.S.

NationSwell: Something that crops up in several places in the book is the idea of public-private partnerships being central to a city’s economic development. Why do you think such partnerships are important?  
Fallows: I think for anybody in D.C., if you hear that phrase, “public-private partnership,” you instantly think BS, because you think it’s just sort of a log-rolling or pork-barreling provision of some appropriations bill. I always thought of it as epitomizing the bad parts of combined corporate and public power.
But in many places [we visited], people could point to something specific and say, “This bridge, this library, this auditorium, this garden, this river walk was the result of a public-private partnership.” And I think that the simplest illustration is this thing in Greenville, South Carolina, the A.J. Whittenberg Elementary School of Engineering, a public school where engineers from BMW and GE are teaching these little kids from the poorest parts of town how to become engineers, and it wouldn’t work if both the public and the private weren’t engaged there. So I think my reflexive cynicism about it was incorrect.
NationSwell: You end the book on a chapter you call “10½ Signs of Civic Success.” Can you touch on your most important findings?
Fallows: The secret of U.S. vitality over the centuries has been [that] it’s always stronger when it makes itself more open and always weaker when it fails to do that. [Thriving towns] make themselves open, and by open I mean to immigration, to people at different stations in life, of allowing people to reinvent themselves, etc. To me, that is the idea of America, and it’s at its best when it does that and worst when it doesn’t. So that’s another way in which something is bad at the national level [but] now seems to be the opposite at the civic level.
Another component here is, I think, practical educational innovation. Not every place can have a big research university. That’s something you have or you don’t. But places that are innovating with community colleges and creative schools, K-12 schools, those are important to connect people with new opportunities, and that was surprising because [we found them] in the South, largely. Engagement and also innovation [like with libraries] — you think libraries would be doomed like the corner newsstand. The corner newsstand is in fact doomed, but libraries, even though they were created around physical books, in many places seem to be reinventing themselves. And then, of course, we have the brew pubs, sort of a show of hands for entrepreneurial arts community.
There’s a line in the book from a guy who said, “If you want to consume a great community, you move to Paris or Brooklyn. You want to create a great community, you move to some little podunk place and you’re part of creating it.” People decide that a certain place matters to them. They’re not just passing through there and just looking for a great restaurant and thinking of where they’re going to go next, but how this place will be in the future, both 10 years from now and when their children are deciding where to live.

The Small Town Coffee Shop That Truly Believes in the Goodness of Its Customers

A lot has been said about the virtues of a small town, but this Valley City, North Dakota coffee shop seriously takes the cake.
As WTVR puts it, The Vault sells everything you might want from a coffee shop, but there’s one glaring thing that’s missing—staff. Perhaps in an industry first, this coffee shop runs entirely on the honor system.
“At the time I didn’t realize how unique that was,” says owner David Brekke in the video below. “I thought it just made sense. I found out later, by Googling, there really isn’t anything else like it.”
Brekke and his wife, Kimberly, keep the store stocked with coffee, tea, syrups and baked goods and customers simply serve themselves. To pay for items, customers just swipe their credit card at a card reader or deposit cash or checks into a slot.
[ph]
MORE: The Restaurant Without a Cash Register
A model like this might only work in a small town like Valley City (population 5,600) but as Brekke says, “people have been extremely honest.”
In fact, customers are even paying more than they should. “When I add up how much has been taken and how much is in the till at the end of the day, people are 15 percent more generous than thieving,” he adds.
According to their website, the cafe does experience theft on occasion but “this unusual plan has thus far been working, profits continue to rise with no one else (seemingly) the worse for it.”
While you probably won’t find a fancy French-pressed roast at The Vault, at least there isn’t a snobby barista who misspells your name on your coffee cup. The Vault also doubles as an art gallery and holds movie screenings, which you probably don’t have at your local Starbucks either.
DON’T MISS: Short on Cash? That’s No Problem at This Farmer’s Market

From Farm to Cafeteria Table: These Students Are Growing Their Own Food

If you surveyed teens as to what their favorite food is, chances are, the hamburger would be in the top three. But while many young people can’t get enough of the patty sandwiched between two buns (possibly slathered in special sauce?), they probably don’t give any thought to how those ingredients are grown and raised.
A unique program in the small town of Hagerstown, Indiana (population 1,769) is changing that, while at the same time, saving the district money. As the New York Times reports, students at the local junior-senior high school are enrolled in a very hands-on agricultural science class that teaches them how to raise their own livestock and crops. Eventually, these items will be harvested and processed and be served in the school’s very own cafeteria.
MORE:How America Is Investing in Local Fruits and Veggies
As the Times notes, the classes are combating two big problems in the community: A decline of local farmers, as well as decreased school funding and budget cuts in the wake of the Great Recession. Turns out, the pork, beef, chicken, fruits and vegetables being grown right on the campus farm is expected to save the school a lot of money — at least $2,000 annually in cafeteria costs. Additionally, the Times reports that that the campus-raised beef is replacing 5,000 pounds of hamburger patties that the district was purchasing at $3.30 per pound.
Significantly, in a town where one of the two listed local groceries is a place called Gas America, this program is encouraging healthier diets, local agriculture, and sustainable farming practices. Garrett Blevins, a junior at the school, told the Times he’s now considering a career in agriculture thanks to the program. “There are kids out there who would never experience agriculture until they join these programs,” he said. “Once they do, it will open up a whole new world.”