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My rules on what makes a town work are nonnegotiable. Gimmicky re-creations, especially those involving period costumes, are disqualifiers, as are any businesses beginning with the name Ye Olde. Functionality is what I look for, an authentic, practical intersection of commercial and social life, and I knew the moment I turned right on Avenue G.--Fort Madison's five-block business strip--that I was home.
A young boy on his mother's hand stepped brightly out of Jo-Lynn Shoe Shoppe--with a springy gait that said his whole world had changed simply because he had been reshod. They turned left and headed for Lampe Drugs, a family operation since 1940. Across the street at Faeth's, the third, fourth and fifth generations of the Faeth family catered to customers in a cigar shop where you can sip a cold Pabst for a buck, buy a box of shotgun shells, find out where the catfish are jumping, play a game of billiards or drop the kids off for a soda and know they're safer than if you'd tied them to a tree. Just up Avenue G., Patty Tucker, a 66-year-old widow who moved down off the bluffs and into an incredible loft above the old bank building four years ago, is peering from her window to see if her girlfriends at the Ivy Bake Shoppe can use an extra hand with the lunch crowd.
So what's Fort Madison's secret? A healthy economy for one thing, with blue- and white-color jobs at Sheaffer pens, Dupont, Dial, Wabash National and a state prison. A sweet, leafy residential area within walking distance of downtown and the riverfront park, for another. And Fort Madison has the dumb luck of being too small to attract the kind of super discount stores that work like neutron bombs on downtowns, leaving the buildings standing but destroying all life forms.
But even at that, nearly 30% of the storefronts are empty. A lot of people are willing to drive half an hour north to the mall and strip stores near Burlington, and a proposed highway bypass will route traffic around Fort Madison. So the true secret of the town's success, then, can be found every Thursday morning at the sinfully addictive Ivy Bake Shoppe, where Martha Wolf and Susan Welch Saunders' blackberry scones make the sorry impostors at a certain ubiquitous coffee-house chain taste like clay pigeons, and where a juiced-up group of local retailers and other die-hards plot strategies for the town, not just for it to survive but to prosper.
"It takes constant vigilance," says Skip Young, 39, who runs the jewelry store founded by his late grandfather Dana Bushong, who was famous around here for being the man who engraved names on Sheaffer pens. Skip's wife Michele, 37, headed up the local Main Street program for two years, serving as the lieutenant who passed on the National Trust's decades of know-how regarding renovation, business loans, retail niches and the marketing of downtown. "We're not where we want to be yet, but in the 15 years I've lived here, it's got a little better each year. You should see the droves that come in for our trick or treat on Avenue G., and the lighted Christmas parade brings tons of people."