Small Towns Are Evaporating

I live in Graves County, Kentucky; the county seat is Mayfield and it has seen it's better days. If you're looking for a good paying job here good luck to you. I feel fortunate to work for a small company (we employ about two dozen) that pays a good salary but many here aren't so lucky.

We used have General Tire, Ingersoll-Rand, Pet Milk and two textile mills. In addition, Mayfield was a place where farmers would auction their tobacco. Tobacco is pretty much history now and so is small town industry. About all Mayfield can boast of now is convenience stores, churches and fast food restaurants.

Remington arms is the latest casualty. It announced it's closure earlier this summer and will layoff 200 workers. Meanwhile, Cracker Barrel has just opened a location and Popeye's will open a restaurant soon. Our community "leaders" have taken a great deal of pride at "creating new jobs". This isn't creating jobs, this is downgrading jobs. I don't see how people with families can make it on the income from one of these jobs. Most times at the grocery I'll be behind someone paying with food stamps.

Anyone else from a small town? Does this sound familiar?

 

The government wants us all to live and work in the city where they can keep an eye on us 24 hours

 

^
Lol

 

True, but it's also easier to control people once they're all herded into the cities. It's also part of Agenda 21.

Personally, I would rather live in a small town and not worry about having a "good job." In small towns people generally live more modestly, and I like that. Cities are artificial hives where nobody can be self-sufficient. The air is polluted and everyone is basically living on top of one another. Gross.

 

Cities are becoming increasingly overrun by zombies as well, which is why I intend to move back to the country.

Less light and noise pollution. A lot of people in the country are trying to do that, but the local councils often make it impossible financially with higher tax bands.

 

Yup... bunch of trendies and annoying millennials who think they're cool.

But anyway, small towns are evaporating, and it's by design. No point in telling people here that, though, because they will just laugh and call you a kook.

 

in america, what used to be small towns, are either gobbled up by the suburbs of neighboring larger towns, or you simply can't get there without a car.
everyone drives their car to the mall, and what used to be mom and pop retailers of just a few decades ago, brick and mortar store fronts are priced out of their reach.
everyone i know is offering commissions over the internet or selling things on amazon or ebay, who in the 50s and even the 70s, would have had a little store on a downtown street.
there are no downtown streets with little stores in small towns anymore, well i won't say none, but everything that used to be in them, is at the mall, where space there is beyond
the cost of what having a little store on main street used to be too.

this is why we've lost the middle class, and capitalism no longer works for the majority, the way it did when we had one.

 

no, we won't laugh and call you a kook, we'll make a lame laugh like grunt and call you captain obvious.
or, i guess, anyone born since raygun, won't really get what we're talking about because they've never lived, seen or experienced it.

maybe, i don't know, in europe there may be some remnant of it, but in the u.s., its like something out of ancient history,
that no one has any basis to believe or disbelieve, its just that remote from most people today.

who think trains and greyhound busses are something that only ever existed in museums, not things they can imagine having been part of everyday life.
i mean they talking about high schools not having big enough parking lots for students, when i went to high school, they wouldn't let students drive to school,
unless they were bringing their car to shop class.

 

Uhm it is not like people in the country are bigger on less light and noise pollution at all (farmers anybody ). It is just so that there is less light and noise pollution in the countryside.

Also: 'zombie like' people can be found everywhere. Some people are dying to leave small towns for the same reason you wanna leave the big city (albeit the reasons why you label city folk as a zombies might differ)

 

It's all in the way such a thought is brought forth.

 

I loved growing up in a small town, and I'm going to retire in the same place.

But the idea of staying there my entire adult life is sad and depressing. Like marrying your high school girlfriend.

 

All the small towns here are too interconnected to neighboring towns as well as the larger city they encircle to really be considered small towns anymore. It is more like one big massive suburb, although some of the towns have done a great job revitalizing their downtown area and still have a small town charm.

 

i would like to have seen more of the world then i have, but i would also have liked to have stayed further away from larger cities then i have without having to impoverish myself to have a car, which i haven't.
(when i was younger i several times had them, but every one of them ended up becoming more hassle then just not having one at all)
i feel stuck in cities by not having one, but i really don't want the hassle of having one, nor of being dependent on others for transportation.
when i last lived in eastern north central california, (the sierras along what is now the i-80 corridor) which was most of my life up until about three and a half years ago, minus the ten years in oregon and a couple of shorter periods elsewhere, the county and some of the not very large towns started having their own little bus systems, which was nice and i hope those are still doing well, but it was just too expensive to stay living there on what my retirement is now.
the county and small town buses are replacements for services, often more extensive, once provided by commercial carriers who have either stopped providing them, or gone out of business entirely. four times more trains close in to the city, for a population between ten and twenty times more then it was when people further away in smaller more rural communities more regularly relied on them and were able to do so.
there just isn't, for the most part in such parts of the u.s. that i'm aware of, the kind of local infrastructure that once made small town life for ordinary people possible.

 

My town is similar. When I moved here in 1990 the population was 20,000. Best estimate today is 38,000. We live about 30 miles (or a two hour drive) from Columbus Ohio. When I first moved here you would see nothing but rural and farmland from here to Columbus. Now it is constant shopping malls or housing developments all the way down to the city.

 

I grew up in the capital, and I love it here.
My family and moi, we are originally from rural Bosnia....the sort of place where there's like one tiny store in a village. I've also spent some time in a small town.
And in my experience, people are not nicer or better or more modest in smaller towns and/or villages.
In fact, I often found just the opposite.
That being said, this city is probably not like cities in the grand USA, so what do I know.

Also, I'm in Bosnia atm, so hello and selam <3

 

Small towns enjoyed an almost stereotypical stability for most of the 20th century. I think 2 factors have contributed to their demise. One is the agricultural shift from family farming to massive, automated factory farming. The other is the shuttering of 20th century factories who's equipment was sold off outside of the country, largely to Mexico and China though some ended up in Russia and Eastern Europe as well. I blame progress for the first and the shift to the information age for the second.

I think packing people into cities is asking for pestilence, pandemic or urban warfare. People can only be on their best behavior for so long. That's why it's a good idea to date someone for a while before planing the future with them. Their best behavior can wear off and expose a dysfunctional reality. It's probably my imagination, but it sure seems like we have far more fooked up cities than successful, enriching cities in the US.

These days the wealthy have their gated communities, some with a theater, grocery store and spa service that emulate the close-knit sort of communities that small towns used to be. Most actual small towns suffer from intellectual and youth flight for viable jobs but the elderly are also leaving because they need better access to healthcare. I'm actually kind of surprised that small towns have not seen a renaissance with all the people capable of working online these days, myself included. But my case is a matter of not being able to find any other kind of work in this small town.

When it gets really bad, I have to get on a plane and work in some hot, muggy developing nation. But the people there are usually nice and most of the work is in small towns. Argentina was a blast, Tunisia, not so much.

 

...small town life is not that great unless youre born there and happen to be in the alpha family...every small town has them...that one or two families that own most of the best land and run the place

 

Kentucky is a hellhole of a place, so I don't feel too bad about small towns dying there, on anywhere else in middle-America.

I'm originally from a large city and have always performed city life. Small town are dull.

All in all, small towns dying is just a natural part of the way things are. Industries dry up, techonlogical changes move jobs, economic changes influence growth opportunity, etc, etc, etc.

 

And their cronies.

 

.....all of that, and small towns are crazy boring