Essays From West of 98: A New Year’s Vigor

Rural revitalization as the calendar flips to 2025

It is a passionate community that brings this many people to a state championship game 150 miles away from home at 11 am on a Thursday morning the week before Christmas.

I have previously written that I don’t view January 1 as much of a true “new” beginning of a year. The beginning of spring is a much bigger shift, albeit usually a gradual one that doesn’t come in one fell swoop. If you live with a connection to the community around you, especially a smaller one, the first day of school each year marks the beginning of a new year. Even so, I still attach some importance to my first writing after January 1. The calendar flips, and that’s about all that changes, but even so, I want to start the new calendar year off correctly. I want to instill a purpose for the year’s writing and set the tone for my months of writing to come.

I’ve written these essays in some form or fashion for over seven years. I have written them while serving as mayor of Stamford for over 6 1/2 years. In some ways, I’ve thought about these ideas since childhood. I know, I was obnoxious at many ages. Some people close to me would question whether that obnoxiousness is in the past tense. Over the years, I have considered a theory (not my own)¹ that there are two types of towns: mining towns and manufacturing towns. This is a general term. The “mining” town is merely a place that extracts a thing and sells it. Sometimes it is an actual mineral, sometimes it is some other resource. The “manufacturing” town makes something and sells it. Under this theory, the manufacturing town is better-equipped to handle major economic changes than the mining town. A manufacturing town can just find something new to make and sell, but once a mining town finishes extracting the resource, there may not be something else of similar value that can be extracted locally and sold, so the town declines.

To some degree, this makes sense. It is easier to find something new to build and sell than to find another unique local resource that may or may not be finite. Yet, the theory does not always hold true. Plenty of mining-type towns have reinvented themselves and many manufacturing-type towns dried up and blew away once the original local industry went kaput.

Rural revitalization occurs through local innovation, good old-fashioned luck, and circumstances far beyond local control. Sometimes, the local people reinvent themselves like that theoretical manufacturing town. They build something new or perhaps they bill themselves as a new tourist destination. Some mill towns and textile towns have reinvented themselves with really impressive local ingenuity. Sometimes, the outsiders show up and turn the place into something new and popular, whether the locals like it or not. If you doubt that, talk to the locals in the most expensive ski resort towns in the American West.² Sometimes, suburban sprawl comes to a place, bringing growth but also changing its character. The counties outlying the DFW Metroplex are a prime example of that. The communities are bigger, but many look very different than they did 20 years ago and your mileage may vary as to whether that is a good thing. That’s a roundabout way to say that every community and its circumstances are different. There are great books and resources that help identify the problems within a community and tools to improve your place, but anybody who has a “magic bullet” for community building (like any other area of magic bullets-for-profit), will lie about other things as well.

Stamford was very blessed to have a truly historic football season this fall. Our team made a run all the way to the state championship game, pursuing our seventh state football title, and fell in triple overtime in one of the all-time great state championship games in Texas high school football history. Along the way there were some big achievements. Our coach became the winningest coach in school history. We became one of a select group of schools that have won 700 football games. I saw our community rally with enthusiasm for the team and coaches. People who are not particularly sports-obsessed recognized that this team’s impact was special. It is no exaggeration to say that the community’s mood was more positive because of the 2024 Stamford Bulldogs football team. Now, I’m not the person to suggest we should center rural revitalization around high school football. Some communities have tried that. It can be a convenient excuse to obsess over football and marginalize everything else in town. But throughout the fall, I thought to myself that we were witnessing an important example of building a community that many people wanted to be part of. I heard from people outside of Stamford who admired our passion and wished that their own community had that same passion for their students and place. I heard of people considering the idea of moving back to Stamford, because they wanted to participate in the movement.

But that’s not all! If you follow me on much of my social media, or if you keep up with local Stamford news, you know that we are pursuing a very ambitious renovation of our historic Carnegie Library. It is one of only five Carnegie Libraries built in Texas that are still operating as a library. Stamford’s community leaders have tried to renovate this building for about as long as I have been alive. It will take over $9 million to fully renovate this library. In a community of our size, that requires significant investment from foundations and others outside our town who believe in our goals. We just got a major pledge for almost 1/3 of the funding and that project is now more realistic than people might have assumed six months ago. People are excited for this project, both inside and outside our community.

There is a movement afoot in Stamford. People WANT to make this place better. They recognize its warts, but they also want to make it a place worth living for themselves and others. They want to create opportunities for our children so that they leave school with fondness and a hope to come back and raise their own families here one day, rather than seeking to leave as fast as possible and never return.

We don’t get all of it right. We need to do many things better. We are a place of imperfect people always trying to contain our divisions, gentle our meanness, and build around our goodwill.³ We will continue to try new things and make mistakes along the way. On many late night drives this fall, returning from football games in places like Snyder, Lubbock, and Olney, I thought about the spirit of devotion in our community and how we could harness that spirit to strengthen the ties of our community far beyond the football field, so that we could grow our community in all the right ways and for all the right reasons. That is the true goal of community-building. It is not growth for growth’s sake alone. I think of the great Western author Edward Abbey, who wrote that “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”⁴ That is how you end up with a community bigger and more prosperous than it used to be, but still itself in name only. I am not interested in building a bigger Stamford that is no different than countless other towns. I want my place to be the best version of itself, for the people from here, for the people who love this place, for the people who choose to be part of this place, because those are the ones who deserve to reap the rewards of its improvement.

I think rural communities need to spend less time figuring out how to attract something from the outside and more time strengthening the inside. We need to look at every single local institution: city government, schools, healthcare, recreation, and more. We need to figure out what we can do within our power to make it all better. Do we need more houses? Let’s figure out how we can build them. Do we need better emergency services? Let’s have our local government think about every possible way to improve those services. Does our school need help providing students with resources or attracting our best and brightest back home to teach school in our classrooms, rather than in someone else’s classroom? I bet there’s something we can do locally to improve every one of those scenarios.

In the movie “Field of Dreams,” the common refrain was “if you build it, they will come.” That’s a dangerous game in rural economic development. A whole lot of communities built some very expensive things, but nobody came. They had the right idea with the wrong application. They did not need to build new and fanciful things. They needed to build our own good things and make them better and more lasting. If we do that, then we give our own people reasons to come back. When they do, others will watch in admiration and join us or make their own places better.

The calendar flipped to 2025 and not much changed about the weather or the seasons. Even so, I am kicking off a new year of writing with a vigor for strengthening what makes my place so special.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and the “Rural Church and State” and “West of 98” podcasts. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to him wherever podcasts are found. Check out the West of 98 Bookstore with book lists for essential reads here.

1. This theory was presented to me secondhand at least a decade ago. I’ve still never been able to pin down exactly where it was first laid out, so perhaps I am the only one using it at this point, but I know it exists and it was not my own creation.

2. For more on this, I recommend “Billionaire Wilderness: The Ultra-Wealthy and the Remaking of the American West.”

3. Yes, this a reference to one of the best lines in “Jayber Crow.”

4. This line comes from a book called “The Journey Home” but if you’ve never read any Abbey, start with “Desert Solitaire.” It is an absolutely essential piece of literature about the American West, but it is also one of the finest personal narratives I have ever read.