Other places...

The population of my home town, Worcester, Massachusetts, was a bit over 200,000 when I was born. Throughout my childhood, that population drifted down as the factories that had built the city shrunk or shuttered. But although for as long as I can remember, I wanted out of Worcester and into a big city, I recall Worcester as vibrant and bustling.

Despite this bustle - downtown (or down city, as we called it) had lots of stores, coffee shops, movie theaters - I seemed to have been born knowing that I wanted something bigger and better.  

I don't recall the first time I went into Boston - likely for a Red Sox game at Fenway Park in the summer of 1960, when I was ten - but my occasional visits there were plenty exciting, and I was delighted to head there for college. (If Boston was rundown and lacking in the late 1960's-early 1970's, I didn't notice.)

Even as a very small child, I was enthralled by the city of Chicago, where we went every other summer to visit family. Every moment spent in the big city was thrilling to me. 

My first trip - via bus - to NYC was in April of 1967. I can still remember the excitement of being on that Trailways bus, heading down gritty Amsterdam Avenue to the rundown Port Authority station in midtown. 

BIG CITIES, YEAH! I always knew I wanted out of Worcester. 

And that was wanting out of a place where there was actually critical mass of stuff to do and see.

However much I wanted out, I never felt good about Worcester's decline, never gloated over it, never felt smug. I felt awful when Denholm's, our main - and our very own - department store closed. (I still have - and regularly use - a gorgeous covered casserole dish my mother got me there.) I felt terrible when all those Worcester factories closed, including Thompson Wire Company, where my father worked in the mill before being promoted to sales. The factory was near where I grew up, and walking by, it was exciting to feel the thrum of the machines whirling out those coils of fine wire, looking in the basement windows to watch the wire drawers at work. And I can still get emotional when I think of the White House restaurant, the nearest Friendly's, the Ted's Big Boy's where I had my first waitress job, closing. 

And I've been delighted to watch Worcester's resurgence (from a modest distance, anyway): bio-tech and med hub, foodie paradise, minor league baseball mecca.

But Worcester always had, as they say, good bones: colleges and universities, a core of loyal civic promoters, proximity to Boston. Plus critical mass. It wasn't going to drop from a population of over 200,00 to a ghost town now, was it? And it didn't. The current population - 206K - is Worcester's highest ever.

I kid with my siblings that I'm going to end up there. They just roll their eyes, but it is not unimaginable.

Other places aren't as fortunate as Worcester. 

They're smaller, more remote, less endowed. And they are ending up as ghost towns.

Which was depressingly brought back to me by an article I saw a while back in the Washington Post that focused on the town of Sheffield, Pennsylvania.

Across rural Pennsylvania, there is a deepening sense of fear about the future as population loss accelerates. The sharp decline has put the state at the forefront of a national discussion on the viability of the small towns that have long been a pillar of American culture. (Source: WaPo)

I think that small town as the culture pillar has been largely exaggerated. The US has been more urban than rural since 1920. But the myth of the sweet and wholesome, all American life lived in Andy Hardy's small town of Carvel, in Andy and Opie Taylor's Mayberry, prevails. Despite today's roughly 80/20 urban-suburban to rural mix, it's those rural small towns that always seem to dictate what the real America is.

If they're the real America, the reality is grim. Despite a small uptick in rural living during the pandemic:

A whopping 81 percent of rural counties had more deaths than births between 2019 and 2023, according to an analysis by a University of New Hampshire demographer. Experts who study the phenomena say the shrinking baby boomer population and younger residents having smaller families and moving elsewhere for jobs are fueling the trend.

Sheffield PA is in the middle of nowhere. The nearest city of any size, Erie PA (pop. 93,500), is 75 miles away. 

Once home to the largest sawmill east of the Mississippi, it's been on the skids for quite a while. ("It is now home to 1,805 residents, a 23 percent decline compared with 20 years ago.")

The town’s decline started decades ago as the lumber mills and tannery shops started closing. But it’s been only in the last decade or so that the full weight of the community’s future challenges began to be felt in intimate ways.

Sheffield’s only ambulance was taken out of service about two years ago, around the same time the community’s only day care closed due to low enrollment. Starting this school year, teens are being bused to a distant high school because there are not enough teachers to staff the local one.

Residents are peeved that the local bank branch and liquor store have closed. The organizers of the town’s beloved Johnny Appleseed Festival recently announced they don’t have enough volunteers or money to continue. And many of Sheffield’s churches no longer have full-time priests or pastors, deepening residents’ sense of malaise.

 What else has gone out of Sheffield, sucking life with it? 

A bowling alley. Car dealerships. Doctors. Pool halls. 

Today, downtown boasts "a small grocery store, a 150-year-old bar, one restaurant, two convenience stores, an antique shop and a small video-gambling room." The bar, by the way, closes at 9 p.m. for lack of business. So Sheffielders can't even drown their sorrows. 

Each mornng, the school district buses high school students to a larger school 30-minutes away, where they study core subjects. In the afternoon, they're back to pokey Sheffield High to take their electives. The Class of 2024 had 32 students. It's probably a matter of time before they close Sheffield High. In the 1980's, high school football games drew 1,000 fans.

What can you do to keep a dying town from dying? 

There are only so many prisons and landfills needed. So many meat processing plants. Only so many towns that can turn themselves into arts hub-lets, or places where work-from-homers actually want to live. What can be done to keep the Sheffields from dying out? What should be done?

I feel terrible for the folks living there, watching their town die.

Having grown up - having fled - Worcester, I know a tiny bit of how they feel. 

Sad, ain't it?