Small Towns Dying as Railroads, Buses, Airlines Leave Them Behind

When Emma Alexander harks back to the days of her youth, she sees this western Kentucky border community as it was then, a bustling little railroad town, a place of high hopes and promise.

If only today’s young people could see what it was like back then, the 96-year-old woman says.

“Why, we had 22 Greyhound buses stopping here every day. And the trains, land sakes, they stopped here every hour, it seemed like. We had four department stores in Guthrie. The streets were always full of people.”

Young People Move On

Now, like thousands of other small towns across the country, Guthrie has been bypassed by the railroads, by the bus lines, by prosperity.

And the young people--looking at now, not then, and seeing no careers, no reason to stay on--flee as soon as they finish high school.

James Golden is one of those who fled.

“First, the movie theater closed, shortly after I finished school, 25 years ago. Then, we lost our high school to consolidation. The trains stopped coming after that. More recently, we lost our bus service. Then, last year, the elementary school was closed.”

Hettie Louise Griffey, a retired teacher, said that she “like to cried when they took away our little school. It’s been one thing after another.”

Taking a Terrible Toll

Such losses take a terrible toll on the quality of life in a small community. And, unfortunately, said Golden, now the research director for the National Assn. of Counties in Washington, D.C., Guthrie has become a paradigm for what’s happened to many country places in the United States.

“It’s sad, what has befallen our rural communities,” he said.

Guthrie was a transfer point on the Louisville & Nashville Railroad. It is the birthplace of Robert Penn Warren, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer.

“It used to be a proud little town, but now there’s almost no hope of bringing in new industry or reviving the spirit of the community,” Golden said.

The plight of these troubled towns cannot be traced to a single cause, but Golden cites two recent blows: the deregulation of the transportation industry in the early 1980s and the end, in 1985, of federal revenue sharing, which provided millions for small-town projects.

Communities Isolated

“With deregulation, the airlines and bus lines pulled out, and many communities became increasingly isolated as they lost their daily links to the wider world,” he said.

A 1986 study by the Interstate Commerce Commission showed that no fewer than 4,514 points lost bus service between November, 1982, and January, 1986. By 1986, more than 10,000 of the nation’s 18,000 named communities were totally without service.

“And the end of revenue sharing has meant a loss of many essential public works projects and a cutback in those social services so important in holding together a community,” Golden said.

A National Assn. of Counties study earlier this year that examined the impact of lost revenue sharing on 28 Kentucky counties found widespread cuts in programs for the elderly, parks and recreation spending and fire, police and ambulance services.

“Our small towns are losing hope,” Golden said. “We’re trying to get a new initiative for rural development from Congress. Something needs to be done.”

20% of Funds Lost

Guthrie Mayor John Coke could not be more in agreement.

“When they took away revenue sharing, we lost 20% of our budget,” Coke said. “And we’re talking about the part that really hurt.”

As a result, he said, the town’s two police cars have well over 100,000 miles each on their odometers, with no funds to replace them. Other services are being maintained at marginal levels.

He shook his head sadly as he surveyed the town’s main street, now dotted with sagging, empty storefronts and even emptier sidewalks.

“Back in our heyday, the streets were always busy,” Coke said. “Salesmen would come to Guthrie, park their cars and take the trains because the connections were so good. We had three active hotels then.

5 Businesses Remain

“Now, about all that’s left of downtown is a drugstore, a funeral home, a hardware store, an auto parts store and a furniture store that’s going out of business.”

The town, he said, is full of railroad retirees and their widows. He acknowledged that there is little to hold the young people, except maybe the prospect of a job in the local sewing factory or wood treatment plant.

“And who wants that?” 18-year-old Sarah Harper of nearby Allensville asked. “I’m in college. I come home to work during the summer, but I’ve got no intention of staying here; there’s nothing here but farm work or a low-level factory job, nothing you’d want to spend your life doing.”

As a result, Guthrie’s 1,800 residents, like those in other small rural towns, tend to be older than the national median. And, at a time in their lives when residents need ready access to medical services, Guthrie has only a part-time clinic staffed by two general practitioners who work out of a mobile home.

Rural Hospitals Closing

From 1980 to 1988, 208 rural hospitals closed, according to the American Hospital Assn. About 130 rural counties, with a total population of more than 500,000, have no active physicians, the American Medical Assn. said.

“We once had seven doctors here,” Emma Alexander recalled. Her late husband ran a busy service station back in the 1930s, when Guthrie was on the main route between Chicago and Florida.

“They called us the crossroads of the world back then,” she said. “You could go anywhere on a train. You could get a train to Nashville three or four times before noon, every day. Now, if I want to go to the doctor over in Clarksville, Tenn., I’ve got to pay somebody to take me.

“There’s no taxi service here, but a local woman has a van, and she’ll take you the 18 miles down to Clarksville. Sometimes, it costs me $25 to $30 to go see the doctor.”

Once-a-Week Bus

Coke points out that Todd County provides Guthrie’s elderly and indigent with once-a-week bus service to Russellville, the county seat. But he says most people would be stuck if they did not have a car or a neighbor to drive them.

“The town started to decline after it was bypassed by the highway and train passenger service began to fall off,” said Robert Penn Warren, who long ago left to settle in Connecticut. The novelist and poet, now 84, was born in the countryside near Guthrie and moved to town when he was very young.

“My father went there because of the opportunity,” he said. “He was the president of a small bank. I went to school in Guthrie, and I can still remember the excitement of the trains stopping at all hours of the day and night. I moved away, but my late brother stayed and built a big grain elevator there.”

When his brother was alive, Warren said, he used to return home frequently. Now, like everyone else, he has little reason to go to Guthrie, the one-time “crossroads of the world.”