Small-Town Blues

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Even on a bleak, late-winter day, the little town of Clay Center, Kans., exudes all the homeyness and warmth of a Norman Rockwell painting. Tidy, freshly painted houses cover the small knoll that rises north of the town square. The homes of the middle class cost about $20,000; those of the poor are timeworn but neat. One of the tallest buildings in town is a barnlike structure built by a woman who gives baton-twirling lessons.

Serious crime almost never happens here; crack and heroin come to town only on TV news shows. Boasts the mayor, Thelma Bisenius: "This is a place where you don't have to lock your door and you can let your children come into downtown alone." Clay Center citizens care about one another, and about outsiders too. The 55-member Rotary Club has raised $30,000 in three years to help administer polio vaccinations around the world. In short, this should be an idyllic place to live. Yet something is wrong here. Clay Center (pop. 4,700) has lost hundreds of jobs in the past decade, which has prompted an exodus of its young people. In all of Clay County, for which the town serves as county seat, the number of deaths (1,000) since 1980 has substantially outnumbered births (900).

Clay Center, like thousands of other small communities from Maine to New Mexico, is struggling to avoid becoming a ghost town. The population of rural America is being sapped by an epic postwar migration to cities and suburbs, a trend that has accelerated in the past decade. Each year since 1985, more than half a million rural residents have packed up and moved away, usually in search of employment. While self-reliant, spirited towns like Clay Center are putting up a plucky campaign to bring back jobs and citizens, such communities now find they are threatened by conditions, ranging from global competition to deregulation, that are beyond their control. As the small towns shrivel away, so does a way of life that helped define America's character. The U.S. is gradually becoming a more congested, coastal megalopolis, with an increasingly lonely place in the middle.

Founded by land developers as a farming center in the 1860s, Clay Center had hopes of becoming a rival of Chicago. Nowadays the four stoplights that mark the corners of the town's courthouse square often change from green to yellow to red without anybody noticing. Most of the shops on the town square rarely get more than two customers at a time. Shoppers who once bustled along the dusty main strip have defected to the new mall in Manhattan, 40 miles to the southeast, or the Wal-Mart outside Concordia, equidistant in the opposite direction.

Though small towns have suffered a critical loss of business and services in recent years, their populations have been ebbing for decades. The decline began as farms started mechanizing and becoming less labor intensive. Says John Keller, a professor of regional and community planning at Kansas State: "Many of these communities peaked in 1890. This has been the longest deathbed scene in history." Many towns tried to diversify in postwar years by attracting industry, especially low-paying light-manufacturing businesses. Many of those jobs, however, were eventually lost to even lower-wage foreign suppliers, especially during the run-up in value of the U.S. dollar in the early 1980s. During this decade, rural areas have created new jobs at only 40% the rate of metropolitan centers.