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By making a radical move to improve their "quality of life"--arguably the signature preoccupation of this decade--these new emigres are acting out a fantasy shared by tens of millions of Americans. Since the migration is likely to accelerate in coming years, their stories offer a sneak preview of what life may one day be like for others toying with the same idea. To understand how these expectations are playing out in one small town that's climbing the growth curve, TIME looked at dozens of towns with expanding economies and populations ranging from 5,000 to 20,000 (anything smaller is a village, anything bigger a city), then spent several weeks in Wilmington--and discovered that cherished notions of small-town life are colliding with the reality of an America that's changing with dizzying speed, even in such quiet places off the beaten track.
Founded in 1810 and settled by Quakers who left Virginia and the Carolinas because they opposed slavery, Wilmington remains a farming town, not a tourist mecca or fashionably quaint bedroom community. Corn has always been king here--an hour southwest of Columbus, an hour northeast of Cincinnati, 45 minutes southeast of Dayton--but now the overnight-shipping giant Airborne Express shares the crown. In 1980 Airborne turned a decommissioned Air Force base on the outskirts of town into its national hub, and the sleepy town's fortunes were changed. Before Airborne, the unemployment rate was 9.8%; two-thirds of Wilmington High School graduates had to leave to find work. But after years of double-digit growth at Airborne, high-tech firms like Technicolor are moving to town to take advantage of Airborne's easy access to world markets. Unemployment is now less than 3%.
That success story landed Wilmington in a 1995 book called The 100 Best Small Towns in America, but as its population has grown from 11,000 in 1990 to more than 13,000 today, the town began getting metropolitan headaches: unplanned development, relentless traffic (36,000 vehicles roll through town every day, 5,000 of them trucks), crime and drugs--even a crack house and a youth-gang problem. Newcomers and old-timers are seeing their visions of small-town life clash, with cultural battles erupting in school-board and city-council meetings. "I moved here because I wanted the cohesiveness and convenience of a town where you could walk to everything," says Marcy Hawley, 49, a Bostonian who came to Wilmington in 1978 and runs a boutique publishing house on Main Street. "But that town is almost gone now. Sometimes it feels as if life here is spinning out of control."
THE PILOT AND DR. RUTH
When Ruth Dooley drove through Wilmington for the first time, on an outing with her husband in the summer of 1995, she saw a town out of time: lovely Victorian, Italianate and clapboard houses with wraparound porches and flags fluttering in the breeze; a shopping district of three-story brick buildings anchored by a domed courthouse, a gabled hotel and the Murphy Theater, a brick-and-terra-cotta confection with a delightful Art Deco marquee. Dooley grabbed her husband's arm and cried, "This is it!" Wilmington seemed to be that "protected environment," she says, "where we could raise our kids in peace."