What Happened to Small Town America?
March 10, 2020
I grew up in a small town in rural Southside Virginia at a time when the middle class was alive and well. We had our share of poor people, a whole lot of middle, and not a single super-rich person. Pretty much everybody drove a Ford or a GM car, both sold at local dealerships, all made in America by union workers. I don’t recall ever seeing a Mercedes Benz or BMW in town.
Blackstone, Virginia had two hardware stores, two florists, two dry cleaners, two drug stores, two furniture stores, two tobacco warehouses, a multitude of grocery stores--each with a specialty and customers loyal to that specialty--and all, except the A&P, were owned by local families. We had one national bank, which changed over the years, and Citizens Bank and Trust, owned by a local family. Our local dairy, Greenleaf, delivered bottles of milk to citizens in town and left them on their front stoops. We lived out of town so we bought ours directly from the Sanger family down the road who raised Guernsey cattle. Every Tuesday, we picked up three half-gallon glass jars full of milk with about two inches of cream on top, Mama scraped off the cream for various decadent purposes, and we returned the empty ones the next week. Local Blackstone businessman Charles Clay ran Clay’s Hatchery, Clay’s Nursery, and Clay’s Rest Home. Gordon Cole had a dress shop for women and a men’s clothing store right next to it. I did all my clothes shopping there when I went home and still have a classic London Fog raincoat still stylish 25 years after I bought it.
Roses Five and Dime, with its ancient, dark brown, pockmarked and creaky wood floor, was not local, but boy howdy, it sure felt authentic. Every September, I stood, practically dizzy with excitement, choosing my school supplies from the neat stacks of pencils, erasers, rulers, and boxes of crayons, in the big wooden bins. Highlighters, sharpies, and dry erase markers were not on our school supply list because they weren’t even invented yet. Picture, if you can, shopping before Dustin Hoffman’s character in The Graduate was told by his father: “I’ve got one word for you, Benjamin: plastics.” Imagine the texture of that world free of plastic, how different from ours now.
Two local sons, Dr. Epes and Dr. James S. Harris, founded the Blackstone Family Practice Center, where medical students from the Medical College of Virginia did their residencies. In its heyday, there were up to twelve doctors available there for the town and surrounding counties.
We were the proud makers of the majority of velvet that lined coffins in America with our local Velvet Textile Mills, also locally owned. We had a stockyard, a lumber yard, an upholstery shop, a Coca-Cola bottling plant, a Craddock-Terry shoe factory (I believe), and a Levi-Strauss plant. All that’s closed now, except for the lumber yard.
Every eatery was locally owned. We had only two fast-food restaurants, Tastee Freeze #1 and Tastee Freeze #2, both owned by Bobo Jones, who had a nice tenor voice and whom Mama tried repeatedly to get to join the church choir. There was not a single fast food chain, (one reason the average American in the 1960s weighed 30 pounds less than today.) Blackstone is not the only place in America you notice that.
You could buy pretty much whatever you needed right there in town, and if there were a problem with it, you took it back and if the repair department couldn’t fix it, they sent it back to the manufacturer and either they fixed it or you got a new one. Things could be repaired. Things had replaceable parts. Buy local was not a bumper sticker then; it was the basis of our economy, and of every small town’s economy.
That world wasn’t perfect, of course. In those days, a woman couldn’t have her own credit card. I didn’t know a single woman in a profession other than teaching. Prince Edward county shut down the public schools rather than integrate and gave birth to the phenomenon of private schools popping up for the sole purpose of avoiding mixing the races. All that, yes.
But here’s my point. I remember when small towns and small farms were thriving places. You could make a living with a small farm or family business. There were things to do. But over the last forty years, all that has been taken apart, quietly, piece by piece, law by law, and what’s left in many places is a rural and small town America wracked by drugs, deaths of despair, and anger.
Things don’t have to stay this way. But we need to educate ourselves with real facts about how this happened and who made it happen and use that knowledge to rebuild life in small town America. It may take a while, but we can do this. I know we can.
©2021 Joy Cunningham