Reaching for Rural Renewal

Memories dance through the decay of this small town, through the wide leafy blankness of Main Street.

The old-timers gabbing over coffee in the lone cafe snatch at the memories and lay them out in lists. They catalog the businesses that once thrived here but are now dead: Three groceries. Two hardware stores. Two farm equipment dealers. Produce stands. Barber shops. A car lot.

Remember the theater? Lawrence Welk played there. And the movies, projected on a brick wall come summer. A dime per picture. Drew quite a crowd. Especially the talkies. “They put that voice in and boy, that was really uptown,” recalled Dale Inness, 76.

The memories are bright as ever. But the town they haunt is fading out, fast. About all that’s left on Main Street now is a bar, a credit union, a post office, a newspaper office with one employee and a might-be-open-might-not lumber store.

It’s the same all across the heartland. From the Rocky Mountains to the Missouri River, from North Dakota to north Texas, rural America is emptying. The decline has been apparent for decades as a slow, sad wasting. But the latest census figures suggest the hollowing of the heartland has reached a crisis point. Seventy percent of rural Midwest counties have suffered drastic population loss in the last two decades. The average drop: at least 30%.

Now, there’s a new proposal to reverse this slide--by paying people to give rural life a chance.

The senators touting it speak with fervor of rekindling the spirit of the American frontier, of drawing a new generation of pioneers to spark life in boarded-up farm towns.

But out here in Meadow Grove--population 311 and falling--folks are not sure the spirit of the past can be rekindled. And some are deeply suspicious of any federal effort to try.

“All this pretending we’re going to keep yesterday alive, it’s stupid,” said Lawrence Sinclair, 48, a dairy farm consultant. “These small towns, they’re history.”

Sen. Charles Hagel, a Nebraska Republican, and Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, refuse to write off rural America as a relic.

Drawing inspiration from the Homestead Act of 1862--which gave free land to pioneers settling the frontier--they have proposed offering financial incentives to anyone who will commit to saving communities like Meadow Grove.

The Homestead Economic Opportunity Act would give tax breaks to people buying homes or setting up businesses in shrinking rural counties. Recent college graduates who move to these areas could write off up to half their student loans. A venture capital fund would funnel start-up money to rural entrepreneurs.

And the federal government would set up special tax-free retirement accounts for small-town residents, matching some of their savings dollar for dollar. To be eligible for the incentives, residents would have to live in a struggling rural community for at least five years.

Hagel acknowledges that it will be tough to get the bill through Congress. He points out, though, that America pulled together--spending billions--to fix up inner cities during the “urban renewal” movement of the 1960s and ‘70s. He maintains a similar coalition could be mobilized around rural renewal.

“If we don’t do something,” Dorgan said, “we won’t have much of a heartland at all.”

Trouble is, at least here in Meadow Grove, it’s hard to find folks who think doing something will help.

At the cafe, at a table with an American flag stuck in a vase, Inness shrugged. “There isn’t any future here. It’s over,” he said.

“I think we pretty much all agree on that,” 62-year-old Roger Suckstorf added.

The seven retired farmers cradling coffee cups nodded.

“It’s useless,” muttered Jack Halsey, 69. “Nothing’s ever going to bring [rural communities] back.”

Keith Turner, an economist retired from the University of Nebraska, agrees. Already, he said, the government has wasted money preserving the infrastructure of towns clearly on the wane--fixing roads and water towers, putting in sewers that serve fewer and fewer people. The federal government also funds programs to bring doctors, nurses and teachers to rural towns and some struggling urban areas. This year, it has placed 2,360 health professionals, at a cost of $147 million.

“We keep putting dollars into so-called saving these towns. All you’re doing is prolonging their demise,” said Turner, who lives in Union, Neb. (pop. 200). “When a town loses its reason for being, why be there?”

Large Operations

Replace Family Farms

The prairie used to be laid out in neat squares of 640 acres. Every square was anchored by four farmsteads--each with a barn, a silo, a family home. Every 15 or 20 squares, there was a town with groceries and machine shops, schools and churches, feed stores and grain elevators.

You can still see the squares when you fly over the Plains. Only, there’s no longer a home in every corner. Agricultural operations now are so big that one farm may sprawl across thousands of acres, pushing farmsteads farther and farther apart.

There are not enough children to sustain local schools, not enough shoppers to sustain local stores. There’s no longer a sense of a community knit together, square by square.

“I feel like we’re just a ... “ Devon Kuether pauses, searching for the word. She has lived in Meadow Grove all her 66 years. She is planting flowers in the sweet summer dusk.

“What do they call those areas around cities? Suburbs. That’s it.” Back to her garden. “I feel like we’re just a suburb.”

The new Homestead Act is designed to give communities a fighting chance to retain their souls. But federal programs are not looked upon kindly here. Folks tend to hold that government meddling does more harm than good.

To prove their case, they point to another subsidy once touted as a fix for the heartland.

Introduced in 1933, as the Great Depression gripped the Plains, farm subsidies were supposed to be a safety net for calamitous times. They have become instead a crucial source of farm income, year in and year out; today, 25 cents of every dollar in farm revenue comes from a government check. In 2000, government support averaged $20,800 per farmer--with the bigger producers getting many times more.

Some economists argue that the subsidies are the only thing keeping many families on the land.

No one here would quibble with that assessment. But some farmers take the money grudgingly--convinced that if the government hadn’t started handing it out, rural America would be much better off.

They trace a bitter chain of woe, starting with the fact that subsidies are paid out based on the number of bushels of grain a farmer harvests. That encourages overproduction. Grain prices fall. Farmers plant more and more acres to make a living. Farms get bigger. Corporations move into agriculture. Families are squeezed out. Towns built for those families collapse.

“Once the momentum gets going in this direction, it’s very hard to reverse,” said Roy Frederick, an agricultural economist with the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

That’s why the vast fields of the Midwest echo with farmers’ anger at the very subsidies that sustain them. And it’s why many folks here disdain the offer of subsidies in the Homestead Act.

“Might as well throw the money in the river to begin with,” snapped 64-year-old Larry Wright, a retired farmer.

“It’ll turn out like the farm program. They’d be throwing bad money after more bad money,” agreed Bob Mather, 67, who owns a gas station and convenience store in Meadow Grove, but plans to shut it down this fall for lack of business.

Congressional analysts have not figured out how much the Homestead Act would cost taxpayers. The only number Hagel and Dorgan have come up with is the $2 billion they are requesting over a decade for the venture capital fund. (By comparison, farm subsidies will cost $180 billion over a decade.)

Bob Warrick, a 70-year-old retired farmer who stands out in Meadow Grove for his liberal-leaning views, dares to suggest that the expense might be worthwhile. Yet even he worries that the proposal relies on an idealistic view of middle America.

“Rekindling the spirit of the frontier.... It’s a little romantic, isn’t it?” Warrick said. “The trouble with the Great Plains is that it’s a very unforgiving place. A lot of people have failed out here.”

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‘I Like It Just Fine the Way It Is’

Painstakingly edging his garden with bricks, Josh Eckert doesn’t think about failure. He does not see his community as lost.

He is 22 and he just bought a house here. Eckert is too young to recall Meadow Grove as it once was; he does not miss what he never knew.

He has no problem buying groceries 20 miles away at Wal-Mart, where he works assembling furniture. It doesn’t bother him that there’s no barber shop in town.

“I like it just fine the way it is,” Eckert said.

His neighbors are more cynical. Yet even as they grumble that their town is inevitably on the decline, they can’t help but give reasons it should not be allowed to die.

They like having public schools so small that no kid who wants to play a sport is ever benched. They find comfort in a town where families spend time together, talking, because there are no movie theaters or skateboard parks or bowling alleys to run off to. And even families with minimum-wage incomes can buy homes--which have been auctioned off for as little as a few thousand dollars after the owner dies. In many rural communities, a four-bedroom house is deemed pricey if it sells for more than $30,000.

Plus, even when stores are shuttered, community spirit remains strong in a place like Meadow Grove, where farmers leave their equipment sheds open in case a neighbor needs to borrow a tool.

“We have something here that you don’t have in Orange County, Calif.,” said Todd Stewart, at 41 one of the few young farmers in town. “When there’s trouble, people help.”

He may be exaggerating the coldness of suburban life. On the other hand, in an isolated town of 300--or even 3,000--there are very few strangers. When Stewart’s wife, Julie, had to go on bed rest during her pregnancy, neighbors came to cook and clean.

When a nearby farmer was sunk in mourning for his dad, his friends harvested every last acre of his soybeans. When a family lost their home to fire, a pork-and-potato benefit raised funds to help.

The pull of community is so strong that the Meadow Grove News, delivered to 150 homes in town, is also mailed to 500 long-distance subscribers--people who left but still want to keep up with hometown news.

Not that rural America is paradise. Crime, especially vandalism by bored kids, is on the rise.

Drugs, especially methamphetamine, are a growing problem. So is pollution from huge livestock lots. And there is much poverty.

But Dorgan finds it ironic that the basic values Americans clamor for in their cities and suburbs--safe streets, solid schools, affordable homes--are the very hallmarks of a rural life ebbing from neglect.

The Homestead Act would not attempt to turn the tide by reviving the old-fashioned family farm. Everyone senses that’s impossible.

Instead, the goal is to foster a diverse economy made up of thousands of small enterprises, from telemarketing services to microbreweries, from the credit-card processing center in Ainsworth, Neb. (pop. 1,800), to the mozzarella cheese manufacturer in middle-of-nowhere Ravenna, Neb. (pop. 1,300).

“A lot of towns of 500, 600 or 1,000 people are not going to make it,” Hagel said.

But with incentives, he hopes enough small businesses will materialize to anchor counties now on the verge of blowing away like topsoil.

The incentives would apply to any county that has lost at least 10% of its population in the last two decades. Two-thirds of Nebraska’s counties would qualify. So would three-quarters of South Dakota’s. And 91% of North Dakota’s.

“No one county or state can turn this around on its own,” Dorgan said. “But the country as a whole can do it, if it decides the heartland is important to save.”

To which Bob Mather, at the counter of his gas station, could only shake his head. He’d like to believe in rural renewal. He can’t.

“If you have to pay people to live here ... “ he said. His voice trailed off. He sounded bitter--and sad.

Outside, the streets of Meadow Grove were silent.

“We’re not going to have small towns like this down the road,” Mather said. “We’re done. This place won’t be here in 20 years.”