Lineville: If It's Time, It's Time

 

Last week, I agreed to sell a prime piece of downtown real estate for $200.

Downtown Lineville, Iowa, that is.

How many urban Americans have the ruins of a small town in their lives, and how might our view of the rural change if we did? My mother’s childhood happened around a prosperous Lineville, and throughout mine it was a site of piligramage, the destination of a long summer drive every year or two. Finally, it’s where we went in 1984 to move my confused grandmother from her collapsing house and into a nursing home, a delicate deed done amid thunder and lightning that left me with the searing image of grandma in the rocking chair on the porch, tornado sirens wailing, defiantly saying that she won’t take shelter because if it’s her time it’s her time. Lineville itself could say the same thing.

Lineville is on the Iowa-Missouri border, paired with the much smaller South Lineville, Missouri. It has a classic 19th century town square, the south side of which is the state line. The Civil War’s boundary was here, and if you needed to draw some line dividing the South from the Lutheran/Calvinist upper midwest, between Faulkner and Garrison Keillor, you’d probably choose this one.

Many laws differ across the line. The remaining restaurant and gas station are on the Missouri side, because the sales tax is lower.  One of Lineville’s claims to fame is that Iowans go there on the Fourth of July because they can buy fireworks in Missouri and then shoot them out over Iowa, where they are illegal. The businesses are still there, with big signs facing north.

The verandah where my grandmother rocked in the face of disaster is now my patch of grass, inherited after my mother’s recent passing.

Next to it, and also long gone, was the home of her brother Denzil, a lifelong bachelor with epilepsy who lived there most of his life, and who never showed an interest in women. I reject the briefest impulse to put a rainbow flag on his grave. I am not here for the culture war.

My grandmother once taught school – including my mother as a girl -- in a one-room red schoolhouse, lovingly maintained by the Wayne County Historical Society until it was recently damaged by arson. But it’s still there, and so is the upright piano where they sang songs 70 years ago.

Lineville looks dead at the center, but there’s life on the edges. Like anywhere, there are people in cars going to and from houses and jobs in the surrounding land. Churches are scattered along the highway. People probably don’t see much value in refurbishing those collapsing old buildings, so they tear them down when they’re about to fall down. The whole north side of the square vanished quite recently; in Street View as I write, it’s still there.

But there is still love here, love of community and place. Commerce has fled the town square but civic life remains: the post office, the city hall and library. The park in the town square is clearly loved and cared for.  Children play and couples even stroll under its fine old trees. 

Abandoned lots turn to grass that the city mows, so that the town is morphing, lot by lot, into a well-maintained park. The people, scattered on the land or in the houses strung out along the roads, care enough to do that. It is remarkable how much pride an apparently ruined town can have.

Like big cities, small towns first evolved around people walking, which created the town squares that people love and that many more prosperous towns have restored. They also revolved around a local economy. The corn a farmer grew just outside of town went onto the train right there in Lineville, not at some big complex far away.

The vacuuming of small businesses into big corporations destroyed downtown Lineville’s economic purpose, and it’s also destroying locals’ ability to enjoy their land. The elite of the same neoliberal forces that killed much of the town is lavishing its unmatchable millions in buying up the land for recreation. A popular hunting show on TV recently made a big deal of Decatur County, just to the west, so the rush is on. For some in today’s aristocracy the proper display of power requires a private hunting reserve, just as it did for kings and dukes of old. Locals can’t afford to get onto the land that defines their identity and sense of place. The small farm, like the small town, is vanishing everywhere.

None of that is news, but now I have pictures, and stories.

I have to love Lineville for its family memories, and for my ancestors in the windswept cemetery, and now for some of my mother’s ashes settling into the grass. I have to love the anger and persistence of some of the people living here. I have to love the mostly elderly people I see in the restaurant, and the efficient and friendly woman who appears to be the whole City staff, and the mayor and city council who decided, in a quick phone poll, that my patch of grass was worth $200. I know how they vote here, and what that does to the world, and I wish I could convey how much many of us in cities share their pain. But I do what I’m here to do, and drive back to the city, feeling as empty as this hollowed town.

 

Comments

[Robin]

Thank you Jarrett, for this thoughtful view. My husbands hometown in southern Illinois is also falling down, hollowed our, although the mining companies left much of it too toxic to mow. Who knows how all this will play out. Maybe when the rising seas take the coasts, abandoned heartland will become valuable.

[George]

Two weeks ago I took a very similar trip to rural Louisiana. The only business left downtown next to the decaying shells of the past is the post office. The pain felt by these communities is real--and one which I would have never known about without seeing it firsthand. Standing in a place like this, one can understand the resentment toward the "liberal elites" living in cities who dominate the nation's political and economic systems, without even an acknowledgement of their rural neighbours. Maybe the first step in fixing our country is for it to get to know itself.

[Billy]

This was a great post. Thank you for sharing!

[Douggles]

I always enjoy your writings on transit, because you clearly know your stuff forwards and backwards. But that blog makes so much sense, sometimes I don't even notice that you're also a dang fine writer. This entry reminded me -- thanks.

[PTC5976]

Thanks for writing this relatable piece, Jarrett. My mom grew up in an East-Iowa small town, her dad owning a Sears store. Almost eerie to see the downfalls of both small-town life and companies like Sears amid the rise of globalization, though of course I'm still convinced that it's the growing disconnection of small towns from the global economy that's fueling this disparity. Not easy to solve with the whole 'clustering force' of the creative economy that's helping larger cities succeed, but hopefully stories like this get places around the world to start thinking more about their residents' futures. Our ability to work together effectively as a country depends on it.

[Sheila Pierson]

Very interesting read.....thank you.
I'm employed at the Lineville Post Office. Moving from Omaha, NE and relocating from Mercer, MO many years ago I find no other place I'd rather reside. Quite frankly both Mercer and Lineville were the 2 places I was determined never to live....however that idea has changed drastically. Most everyone is kind and caring and nothing is more gratifying in my job than to visit with my customers, sharing concerns, local news. I find when push comes to shove..small town folks CARE and are there for you. God Bless our small town.