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There is life in some small towns yet. Attracted by the concentration of scientific and technical brains in the Boston area, the electronics industry has brought an economic revival to many Massachusetts towns stricken by loss of textile plants. The highways that cripple some small towns can help others; many a little town, rescued from decay by a new highway, now makes a living catering to motorists instead of farmers or miners. And highways often make it possible for residents of a small town to get to and from new jobs in another, larger town. A few years ago, Adams, Mass., appeared to be doomed by loss of textile mills, but enough townsmen found jobs at the General Electric plant in Pittsfield, 14 miles away, to keep Adams alive.
Thinking Big. Sometimes civic leadership and gung-ho spirit revive a dying place. The population of Clarksville, Mo., declined from 800 in 1940 to 338 in 1960. The town had no doctor or dentist. Three out of every four youngsters in each new crop of high school graduates departed for more promising places. But under the leadership of a local automobile dealer, Milton Duvall, a group of townspeople formed a development corporation with capital of $132,000. Its first project was a $50,000 medical center; dedicated in mid-1961, it quickly attracted a doctor and a dentist. Since then Clarksville has started building an industrial park, improved its transportation facilities and its water supply. Today a $300,000 clothing plant is under construction, several small businesses have opened, and the population has grown to more than 900.
Such bootstrap improvement is not always possible, for many towns are simply too small, too poor, and too far gone. As some experts see it, the answer is for small towns to join together in larger economic and administrative units. Working together, several neighboring small towns could provide schools and other public facilities that they could not otherwise afford; instead of competing with one another for new industries, they could work out joint development plans.
One way or another, whether they wither away, become dormitories in suburbia or merge with neighboring communities, the small towns of old are vanishing, and with them will vanish one dimension of the nation's life. The small town had its defects as a place to live in, and urban Americans who know it only from the pages of Sinclair Lewis, Sherwood Anderson and other look-back-in-disgust fiction-eers are likely to think of the small town only as narrow, ingrown, stunting. But for many, life there had its compensations —countryside within walking distance, acquaintances rather than hurrying strangers on the streets, and a serenity that city dwellers cannot even imagine.
* Named after a 19th century New York financier, Eugene Jerome, whose cousin Jennie was the mother of Winston Churchill.