Essays from West of 98: Instructive Nostalgia

Why does nostalgia stir our hearts and minds?

It is a fascinating thing. Our brains tend to remember the past as we choose to remember it. Good memories stand out, while bad memories are often glossed over. Sometimes, bad memories are repurposed towards the good (“it made me tougher!”). We can glorify the “good old days” without examining whether they were as “good” as we remember.

From an emotional standpoint, there’s nothing wrong with nostalgia. This helps us draw closer to our roots. It helps us find a proper perspective on life and how we fit within a changing world. On the other hand, nostalgia can be a problem when it overtly influences public policy. Nostalgia can distort a leader’s decision-making process. It can cause us to try and re-create a past that existed only in rose-colored memories and never in reality.

As I have studied the rural revitalization question, I have seen how local nostalgia underlies some very important, legitimate feelings within people. Nostalgia for the “good old days” in town is actually a fondness for an era in which the community was prospering and growing. It was an era in which good jobs were plentiful, buildings were full of businesses, and downtown was full of people on Saturday.

These fond feelings are for an era when local economies worked for the benefit of the local community and its people.

In one of his more recent books, Wendell Berry (it’s been a few weeks since I mentioned him) recounts a 1946 promotional advertisement for New Castle, the seat of his home county of Henry County, Kentucky. New Castle boasted at least 55 stores, shops, and offices in those days, with everything from four grocery stores and two dry goods stores to a hatchery, a shoe repair shop, five doctors, a printing shop, five lawyers, six insurance agents, and more. New Castle had a population of only 650, but those people mostly shopped locally and New Castle served a surrounding area that was filled to the brim with small farms. Today, New Castle has a population of 900 or so. Henry County’s population has grown from about 12,000 in 1946 to more than 15,000 today. New Castle’s business roster, however, is dismal. Despite more population, it has but a dozen or so businesses. The dollar store on the outskirts of town is the closest stand-in for a grocery store.

Henry County is not alone. Many communities with an agriculture economy have a similar tale to. Recently, our downtown Museum of the West Texas Frontier opened an exhibit about Stamford 75 years ago. In 1947, Stamford was much larger than New Castle. This was our peak population of over 5,600. The surrounding countryside contained multitudes of people. The business roster is simply staggering: three movie theaters, 14 car dealers, 25 grocery stores(!), and at least four barbers and seven beauty shops, not to mention jewelers, dry goods stores, department stores, dress shops, and a host of other businesses that are foreign to small towns of the 21st century. You don’t need me to recount today’s business roster in Stamford to know it is a far cry from 1947. In many ways, Stamford is more fortunate than many towns. Walmart and Dollar General have replaced grocery and dry goods stores, but at least we are not bereft of options entirely.

What changed? Why were there so many local businesses then and so few today? Look at the example of New Castle: it has grown in population but the local retail economy has utterly collapsed. I have written about the decline of the rural economy and its connection to the mechanization of agriculture (you can read that essay titled “Five Rural Priorities: Economic Development”).

If we want to pull our local communities out of the death spiral that rural America has experienced for over a half century, we need to talk more about how and why our rural economies have declined. A long line of leaders from both political parties have contributed. The results have been catastrophic, but we need not remain victims of those decisions.

It is up to us to chart a new course for our local communities.

James Decker is the Mayor of Stamford, Texas and the creator of the West of 98 website and podcast. Contact James and subscribe to these essays at westof98.substack.com and subscribe to West of 98 wherever podcasts are found.