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Ginger Walker, a vivacious 30-year-old Clay Centerite, launched her own business, Ginger's Shoe Shoppe, three years ago. Her stylish boutique carries an impressive assortment of stock, and has attracted enough customers so far to make a passable profit. Says Walker: "The biggest challenge is to compete with the large communities around us. Our prices aren't that much different. It's just the magic of the malls."
The growth of huge regional discount stores -- despite all the convenience they provide -- has been devastating for many small downtowns, since one shopping center can draw customers away from a dozen or more communities. Says Robert Van Hook, executive director of the National Rural Health Association: "Wal-Marts are the last nails in the coffins of a lot of rural Main Streets." Because downtown retail shops are important employers, their decline can be fatal to the rest of the town's economy as well. Another major small-town employer, the local hospital, is disappearing at the rate of more than 40 institutions each year. A principal cause was the 1983 decision by Congress to eliminate suspected rural subsidies in the Medicare system by reducing payments to small-town hospitals.
Though the whitewashed grain elevators two blocks from Clay Center's town square are still in use, the county's economy is no longer primarily agricultural. Clay County benefited during the 1950s and '60s from the arrival of manufacturing companies that produced such goods as metalworking equipment and grain-handling machinery. But in the past decade almost 300 jobs have disappeared. Says Mayor Bisenius: "In the past few years we have realized that we cannot exist as a town without something new coming in."
In January, during three days of meetings that rang with a fervor akin to that of an old-time tent revival, almost 200 residents anted up more than $250,000 to buy a small equity stake in a new Kansas City-based company that plans to produce light aircraft. Townspeople hope their investment will help persuade the company to put its assembly plant in Clay Center, where it would provide 300 jobs. Says Deanna Fuller, a former farmwife who heads the local economic development group: "These people just want to make it possible for the young folks to come back."
Smokestack chasing, as the practice of wooing factories has become known, is rampant in small-town America. Although often portrayed as a response to problems in the farming sector, in many cases the search is an effort to replace the industrial jobs lost in the 1980s, says Kenneth Deavers, a chief economist for the Agriculture Department. Farming and related businesses account for only about one-eighth of rural employment. Attracting new industries to a small town can be tricky. "A lot of these firms are gypsies. They fly from one set of subsidies to another," notes Mark Lapping, dean of architecture and design at Kansas State.