Made No Utopia
By Jim Sullivan
A future progress movement is likely to leave people without any future
I just got back from transferring our town drunk to the nearest large regional city. There was nothing left for him in our city of Greenbush , which in its heyday had 800 residents. Now the town's about to close down, like so many other little towns across America .
For our town lush, no bars, taverns, beergardens, or grocery stores selling beer, wine, or liquor remained open for business. Moreover, so many people have moved out of town already, there's hardly anyone to drink with or for him to bum a libation from. Transporting this poor besotted soul to a bigger community was my last humanitarian act before I moved out of town myself.
The former town fathers and mothers had asked me to, after relocating the town drunk, turn out the street lights, make that the one street light that we were down to. And I was supposed to shut off the valve at the city water pumping station, too. Having removed the last needy person from our dying, or should I say dead, and decayed community, I could now carry out these orders.
Greenbush had been gasping for breath for years. How it lasted as long as it did was a miracle. Its demise, however, was a foregone conclusion. When the interstate highway bypassed our town, we were doomed. Yes, folks said they were glad that all those cars wouldn't be clogging up our town's roads. But the retail store people knew in their hearts that they would be losing a lot of business. Sure enough, half the dozen or more stores that had served our community well for decades closed their doors for good. Some of those former owners retired to Florida . But many entrepreneurs moved to nearby large cities with populations of 40,000 plus to re-open businesses. It's too early to tell how well they'll do. My guess is that they'll flourish.
Slowly in Greenbush it got difficult, then impossible, to purchase grocery items, get prescriptions filled, have haircuts and permanents, fill up a gas tank and have that vehicle serviced. The only dry cleaners left years ago. And we haven't had a jewelry store in town since I can't remember.
Thanks to aggressive Chambers of Commerce across the country, which enticed our companies to move to their communities, we lost most of the small factories that had employed 20 or 30 people. Most plants moved south long ago. The two manufacturing companies that stayed on have now closed their doors and are in the process of relocating to Mexico . None of their former workers were taken along. Some of the younger laborers got new jobs in the big city. For a while, they commuted home to Greenbush. But with the cost of gas and transportation, they all eventually moved to where they worked.
As life was ebbing in small towns, real estate values within them fell through the floor. People were glad to get twenty-five cents on the dollar of value from their homes that just ten years earlier might have sold for $19000 to $25000 or so. It was sad to see these folks lose what they had been paying on for all their married lives.
Not surprisingly, our schools had to merge, many years ago, with the little town down the road. But with all those people moving out, their homes selling quickly, if at all, and our businesses gone, there was next to nothing in revenues coming in for schools.
At one time, Greenbush had three policemen and six city workers who picked up garbage all year around, cut city lawns and park lawns in summer, removed snow in winter, and generally kept our city and its streets clean. For the last three years, as things got tougher and tougher financially for the community, it had to let most of those employees go and make do with one policeman and two city workers. There simply wasn't enough tax income in community coffers to pay anyone else.
The town initially had been a farm service center. Farmers within a ten-mile radius came to Greenbush to store their grain in the community silo and to purchase their seed, fertilizer and equipment. They also came to town to buy food that they couldn't produce on their own, to get shoes fixed, haircuts, see the doctor, get advice from a lawyer, or have their teeth cleaned.
Well—many of those farmers have since gone bankrupt. They've had to sell their farms, for the most part to corporations. Those farmers weren't able to pass their farms on to their children. When the former farmers went to the big city to look for factory jobs, these people couldn't find employment. They seemed to be too old, unskilled, or uneducated in the ways of the modern world. So many of them gave up looking for employment and took a puny retirement and eked out an existence in the big, expensive city. Professional people had vacated long ago. The big city offered more potential and a steadier clientele who weren't on the verge of moving elsewhere.
Trains used to stop in Greenbush. But they ceased doing that in the early 1950s. Then the railroad closed altogether in the mid-1960s. And though our community had originally been founded, as were most American towns, for commerce, because we were on a navigable waterway, in our case the Silver River, our water highway, so to speak, hadn't been used in over a hundred years.
With no retail businesses, no factories, and fewer and fewer residents, churches, not unlike schools, struggled to stay open. But their memberships, dues and tithing evaporated. Soon, these houses of worship closed, too. Since a year ago, no church has claimed Greenbush as home.
Our public library, despite a complete lack of funds (and thanks to the kindness of our dedicated elderly librarian who paid the light and heating bills each month from her own savings, which weren't being added to any more because of her now non-existent salary), stayed open the longest of any of our public institutions. But the wonderful librarian died, breaking everyone's heart, and the library finally closed. It's a further shame, but the librarian couldn't even be buried in a funeral home in Greenbush, for there was no longer such an establishment in town. The one mortuary we had had couldn't afford to stay open with so few people staying in town to die.
Ten years ago, the writing was on the wall about the death of Greenbush. The youth of the community stopped coming back to live here after graduating from college or getting out of military service. And without some of those young adults to live in and love this community, as their parents had, there was no one to take over the leadership of this small town. Certainly, no outsiders wanted to relocate to Greenbush. After all, the future was in big cities with jobs, homes, businesses and schools.
As soon as I finish writing this, I'm shutting off what's left of the town's facilities and such. I wonder how the two families still residing here will survive. I worry about them, especially their children, and so I'll pray for their welfare tonight in my new home in the big city. I don't really care much for the larger community, but I have no choice of where I can live now. My only consolation in the demise of my home town of Greenbush is knowing that across the nation, hundreds of little towns have died or are dying. It's a sad day for America to lose its small communities.