Reviving small towns

Most small towns are still struggling, as a tour of boarded-up Main Streets in the rural heartland will show. "Outmigration" has drained their populations over the past century. Agri-businesses have replaced small farms, and shopping malls an hour away (not to mention Wal-Mart and the Internet) have undercut local shops. In many small towns only old people are for the most part left, as there is little to attract the young. Just 17% of America's population today lives outside metropolitan areas.

Some surviving small towns have simply become bedroom communities for large cities, and have lost their character. But others deeper in the boondocks remain determined to beat off the doomsayers with creative ideas.

[Tiny] Colquitt (population 1,900) in southern Georgia, one of the poorest parts of America, has been revived by a storytelling festival known as "Swamp Gravy". 40,000 people come each year to the festivities, which are held in a converted cotton mill.

Some organisations are trying to help small towns along. One of the most important is the National Trust Main Street Centre, which aims to revitalise central streets by preserving historic buildings. Volunteers staff its local branches; most states have them. Funding is local, but the national organisation provides training and know-how.

Clothing and hardware stores will never return to the town centre. Rather, says Mr Loescher, restaurants and bars, government offices and even private houses should be given a place near Main Street.

State aid for small entrepreneurs also helps. Rather appealingly, [Chuck Hassebrook, executive director of the Centre for Rural Affairs in Nebraska] proposes that the federal government shave 5% off its enormous farm-subsidy programme -- which goes mostly to mega-farms -- and give it to small business.

For Main Streets that find no buyers but want to preserve their heritage, two promising themes for revival emerge. First, art. There is money in painting and plays. These draw tourists -- and artists, for their part, seem quite happy about the low cost of living. The town of Nelsonville, in southern Ohio, has become an "artists Mecca" in recent years, according to Will Lambe, a research associate at the University of North Carolina who is working on a book about small-town economic development (which covers Colquitt too).

A second theme is alternative energy. Across the emptying Great Plains, towns are praying that sun, wind and plant matter will stop them from withering away. "Everybody I talk to is trying to get on this bandwagon of biodiesel and ethanol and wind," says Mr. Lambe.