Another NY Times take on rural culture, in relation to Trump and MAGA

Today's New York Times Opinions podcast features a conversation about "The Aesthetic that Explains American Identity Now."  The alternative headline is "MAGA and the Country Aesthetic."  Here's the NYT's overview description of the episode: 

Rural aesthetics are in, from cowboy boots to country albums by pop stars to pastoral idealism peddled by influencers. The New York Times Opinion editor Meher Ahmad speaks to the columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom and the contributor Emily Keegin about what these cultural touch points mean for our politics and society at large.

Before including some key quotes, I'll just observe that I think the commentator's argument is overstated.  Here are some excerpts:  

Ahmad: Both Tressie and Emily are keen observers of the cultural zeitgeist, and in their own spheres they’ve been noticing an ongoing mainstreaming of all things country and rural. Think shows like “Yellowstone” and “The Hunting Wives”. Pop stars like Beyoncé and Sabrina Carpenter produce country songs as part of their repertoire. And tradwife influencers like Hannah Neeleman, popularly known on social media as Ballerina Farm, has now more than 10 million followers.

* * *

McMillan Cottom: There’s a show where a farmer takes a wife ... But you can even get into shows that aren’t as character driven, where the rurality is actually a character. So then you’ve got shows where there are alligator hunters in Louisiana, a show called “Swamp People.”

* * * 

Keegin: Yes. I think we’ve had a very long romance with rural aesthetics in this country.  (emphasis added)

And after the second Trump win, what I noticed was there was a big cowboy trend that took off. Denim is big. Western culture is big. “S.N.L.” this season had a musical act in a hayloft. Realtree coming in and dominating the sweatshirt world.

Ok, honest confession, I had to look up "Reatree."  Had no idea what that was.  I had heard of a realty company with a similar name selling rural properties.  As best I can tell, the two are not related. 

Keegin: Well, OK. Where would you have seen it? You would have seen the pattern on the merch of Chappell Roan. She has a hat that says “Midwest Princess.” And Midwest Princess, I think, is part of this trend, as well. That was picked up by the Harris Walz campaign. If you recall they also had a Camo hat.

* * * 

McMillan Cottom: When we’re talking about being romantic for rural life, we’re really talking about an imaginary place. This isn’t really the rural life that actual people who live in rural America tend to be familiar with. These are signifiers that are maybe less about a physical place, a geography.  (emphasis added)

I would say the divide is between nostalgia and today’s politics. It manifests in many different ways. But when you say something like “Make America Great,” that’s a backward-looking vision. That is not about the future — although it’s trying to own the idea of what the future should look like. It is really calling to a nostalgia for an imagined American past where all families were “traditional” and all women were real women and home life looked this way.

* * *

Keegin: We look at how culture changed through the Clinton years and what was on TV. And when the rural revolt happened in 1994, we had a narrative around that about a shift in a rising conservative culture in this country — which was absolutely true. Narratives are based in truth. And our television shows followed that. 

* * *  

McMillan Cottom: [K]eeping in mind that when we talk about Donald Trump being a sort of a quintessential New York urban figure, that may be true in his biography, but we’re not talking about real places when we talk about urban versus rural.

And when you appeal to rural, you are always, always, calling up the idea of urban. These two things exist at the same time. So that’s the first thing.

The second thing is: I would say that what Donald Trump does — the way he enters into the rural imagination: He does it through Southernness.

* * *

I think that what Donald Trump does is he becomes associated with rural life because of how often he has appealed to Southernness, when he, of course, raises the specter of racism or raises the specter of genteel womanhood — all of those things that the South is kind of known for.

They came in the figure of Donald Trump and his rhetoric, so we keep this big treasure chest — a repertoire of ideas in the South. And when somebody wants to call them up, they can go and open the toy chest, and there it is. You can pull out the Confederate flag, and you can pull out songs of the South or whatever it is.

And suddenly, people’s imagination is in the South. Well, once you are in the South, in the imagination, you are just a — if you’ll forgive me — you are just a hayride away from rural America.

And so those two things, I think, are happening simultaneously with Donald Trump. Appealing to nostalgia will always have political power, especially when people are very anxious and afraid, which is what I would argue people are — for many, many reasons. And that’s why I think Donald Trump reads as rural to some people.

Although I’d pay money to see Donald Trump in actual rural America, for what it’s worth.

* * *

Keegin: You know, Donald Trump shows the seams. You see where the makeup ends on his face. It’s very clear that his hair is done by himself, and you see the grease in it. There’s a photo of him where you see that he holds his tie together with tape.

I think when we boil down what a rural aesthetic is, regardless of who is engaging with it, it is about the human hand and showing what humans create — versus the urban aesthetic, which is based in machines and in technology. We think about our urban centers: That is where we produce a lot of our culture, but they’re also the center of our governments and our financial centers.

All of the aesthetics that we associate with urban life come from those occupations, which are about the mind over the body. This is not where you are toiling and making things with the human hand and with your physical self. And that is the schism. When I look at Trump, I think: Yes, there are a lot of things about him that are very rural — because he’s not slick.

Then there's more in this podcast about the "Renaissance of country music" and what it suggests about this political moment.  I'll leave that to you readers to assess.  Some of the illustration of what these NYTimes folks label "rural"--especially matters related to cowboys and Taylor Sheridan's "Yellowstone"--seem to me more specifically about the imaginary associated with the "wild west" and with patriarchy.   In the latter regard, I was reminded of Kristen Kobes Du Mez' Jesus and John Wayne, a book I highly recommend.  

The rise of the "barndominium" and the "shouse"

Since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, migration to rural areas has substantially increased. From 2019 to 2023, large urban areas like New Orleans and Cleveland experienced smaller population growth than average as many city dwellers moved to rural and rural adjacent places. The loosening of in-person work requirements likely played a large role in this migration to rural areas.

Theoretically, the pandemic's resolution and subsequent return to in-person work should have ended the rural migration trend, yet many Americans are still trading city life for country living. For instance, as of late 2024, young families with children were increasingly leaving big cities, opting instead for rural counties and small metropolitan areas. 

The benefits of living in the country are somewhat obvious. Cities tend to come with a higher cost of living, overwhelmed public school systems, higher rates of crime, and greater environmental pollution. This reality, combined with a rising cultural appreciation for the countryside aesthetic, has set the stage for homeowners to embrace a lesser-known phenomenon: the "barndominium."

Picture this: 14 acres in the middle of nowhere, abundant open space, and the opportunity to design your own home at a far lower cost than purchasing a traditional house. For people like the Barndominium Lady Stacey Lynn Bell, who built her dream barndominium and now helps others do the same, the appeal is irresistible. In a recent New York Times article reporting on the barndo's surge in popularity, Bell explained that: 

More people want bigger homes, more distant neighbors, land to raise chickens and grow vegetables, and an environment 'not as hustle-bustle.'

In the same piece, Brittany VanHouten shared that she and her husband expect their barndominium in Citrus County, Florida to be 4,500 square feet and include a home theater, library, craft room, and spacious detached garage, once finished. The Florida couple estimated their new home would cost under $300,000, which falls on the lower end of the average price to build a home in their area.

On top of all these advantages, barndominiums are often disaster-resilient, long-lasting, and energy-efficient. This is largely due to their slow-to-rust steel frames and customary metal roofs, which can withstand high winds and hurricanes. Pertinently, climate and disaster-resilient features are "very important" to 86% of homebuyers, according to a recent Zillow survey.

Of course, the barndominium has its disadvantages, too. As with rural living in general, taking up residence on vast open land may mean sacrificing easy access to schools, places of employment, restaurants, and shopping centers. 

A partial remedy to this problem is the shouse, an even more niche category of housing also taking over rural America. The term "shouse" is derived from a combination of "shop" and "house." While the shouse is extremely barndo-esque, it provides the additional option of allowing owners to combine their living space with their workshop. This feature virtually eliminates commute time, unless you count the time it takes to walk from one room to another.

Further, while a greater emphasis on function over form renders shouses somewhat less cosmetically appealing than their barndo counterparts, these structures share many of the same advantages, including lower costs and energy efficiency. 

If migration trends over the last few years are predictive of those to come, rural areas are likely to continue to experience an influx of new residents from bigger cities. Unfortunately, housing prices have already begun to increase in smaller towns and rural areas due to this shift. However, for those with the resources, patience, and vision, a barndominium or a shouse might allow potential homebuyers to make their rural dreams a rural reality.

Countryside aesthetic for sale

Imagine images of ivy-covered cottages, floral-printed summer dresses, and pastel-colored tea parties hosted beside lush, green meadows. These scenes are all part of a social media trend referred to as “cottage core.” Simply put, the aesthetic centers around embracing the simplicity of countryside living and focusing on a slower pace of life. A New York Times article described the trend:

It could ​​be the beginning of a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, before the inevitable darkness seeps in, but rather it’s the backdrop of a budding aesthetic movement called cottagecore, where tropes of rural self-sufficiency converge with dainty décor to create an exceptionally twee distillation of pastoral existence.

The modern escapist fantasy has been around for ages but became increasingly popular around 2020, especially on social media platforms like TikTok and Instagram. The cottage core aesthetic was likely embraced partly as an antidote to the panic and stress of living in close proximity to others during the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, this popular aesthetic does not account for its gentrifying effects on rural communities. Rural gentrification refers to the migration of affluent urban and suburban residents into rural places. This process can lead to real consequences – some of them negative – for rural residents. As Pilgeram wrote in an In These Times essay:

These include the displacement of poor, working-class, and middle-class people from areas experiencing gentrification because of the increasing price of housing and land, sometimes pushing existing residents into communities that are considered ​“chronically poor,” where they can afford housing. Thus, these demands create new opportunities and tensions within the community, particularly its land-use patterns.

The trend encourages consumers to buy land and homes in picturesque rural towns so that they, too, can cultivate a romanticized country lifestyle. These “rural gentrifiers” are usually more abundant in picturesque towns located in the West and Midwest, but no region is exempt from the force of rural gentrification.

One example is Gunnison County in Colorado. The county has scenic lakes and mountainous landscapes, which are an ideal backdrop for the cottage core aesthetic. The area has attracted many affluent families who have purchased second homes. The surge of wealthy residents, however, has left a housing shortage and accelerated income inequality. This forces the valley’s low-paid seasonal and service workers to pay more than average for housing:

According to Headwaters Economics, a nonprofit research firm, Gunnison County’s workers devote 32% of their income on average to rent, compared to 19% in non-tourism-based economies.

The housing in Gunnison County is in such short supply that many of the local motels have become month-to-month rentals for low-income families. Long-time rural residents are thus forcibly displaced as families are made more vulnerable and a cultural rift divides the community.

Although only the wealthy few can afford second homes in these rural communities, the need to buy into an aesthetic can lead to real and catastrophic effects. When the trend starts to fade away, rural residents are forced to deal with the aftermath.

To learn more about rural gentrification, see How and why Democrats are failing to attract rural voters: Is it the economy, stupid? and On rural gentrification, and the ensuing housing shortage, in coastal California.

"Ornery Artist's Hand-Written Screeds" in rural Missouri now subject of major art exhibition

Greenville, California, March 2013

NPR ran this story last month about Jesse Howard's 20-acre compound of hand-painted signs, which he called Sorehead Hill, in Fulton, Missouri, population 12,790.  Here is the lede of C.J. Janovy's story:

By all accounts, self-taught artist Jesse Howard was cantankerous. In middle of the last century, it wasn't unusual to see hand-painted signs on country roads advertising a traveling fair or a farm sale. But Howard's signs offered Bible verses. They proclaimed his anger at his neighbors and the government, and his disappointments with the world around him. "Every word I'm saying's the truth," the artist said of his work. "Every word." 

Seen in Madison County, AR, May, 2010

Howard's work hangs in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the American Folk Art Museum in New York and the American Visionary Arts Museum in Baltimore. Now, the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis has opened the first comprehensive survey of his work.

Court Street, Jasper, Arkansas 2011

Leslie Umberger, the Smithsonian folk art curator, explains the significance of Howard's work—and the work of others who built such environments in the 1940s and 1950s, including Sam Rodia in California and Fred Smith in Wisconsin.  Umberger says Sorehead hill was an

"art environment," or a personal space that's "built or constructed by an individual who, for whatever reason, decides to kind of reshape his or her corner of the world."  

According to Umberger, well-known artists like Roger Brown and Jasper Johns ultimately took note of what Howard, Rodia and Smith were doing.  Umberger continues:

And it makes a big difference because people start to really equate this radicalism with having a strong voice, a strong opinion, being truly original, for standing up for what you believe in and fighting for it.

Janovy reports, too, that Howard had to fight neighbors who "tore down his signs and vandalized his property," even seeking in 1952 "to have committed to an asylum," a fate he was able to avoid.

Hwy. 7 South, Jasper, Arkansas, November, 2011

All of this reminded me of some of the hand-painted screeds I have seen in rural places in recent years.  One is from Greenville, California, population, 1,129 (top), and the other near the community of Marble in Madison County, Arkansas, population 15,701.  These are similar to Howard in the sense of protesting against the government—or in the case of the Madison County sign, another individual--in one way or another.   

Hwy. 7 South, Jasper, Arkansas 2011; sign reads "Not Responsible for Accidents

The bottom photos are from Jasper, Arkansas, population 466, county seat of Newton County, Arkansas, population 8,330.  The first of these photos is of old fashioned junk shop and the last two, photographs of a ????? (outdoor junk shop?) taken two years apart.

Whatever it is, the owner is concerned about fending off liability because the latter version, two years after the first, features  sign that says "NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ACCIDENTS." (Very interesting for the torts professor in me).  While perhaps not political, all seem fairly artistic to me.  In particular, the last two photos of the same place two years apart show the proprietor becoming more artistic (and perhaps less entrepreneurial—less interesting in selling stuff than in displaying cultural artifacts in an interesting, even pleasing way) over time … 

Art and community in rural America

I recently took a road-trip through Washington, Oregon, and Idaho and encountered a variety of settings along the way. I drove through lush forests, snow-capped mountains, and dry, desert-like landscapes. I passed countless farms and a few small, isolated towns like Pilot Rock, Oregon with a population of 1,500.

It was not until I returned to the Bay Area that I realized how aesthetically different those small towns like Pilot Rock are from San Francisco or Oakland. The difference that stood out to me was not the obvious one of skyscrapers versus farmland, or bustling city streets versus virtual ghost town. Rather, when I returned to the Bay Area I was struck by how much the urban landscape incorporates and showcases art in comparison to the rural areas I visited.

Of course, big cities like San Francisco, Oakland, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles are centers for art. Aside from their many museums and universities and art programs, these big cities are littered with murals and sculptures. In fact, urban areas make art out of the most mundane objects. I have seen public garbage cans ornamented with mosaics and intricate paintings on utility boxes in Oakland. 

The big, urban cities mentioned above are home to a community of artists, including some that are homegrown and some who have moved to the city for the purposes of pursuing their art. Though rural areas generally do not appear to showcase art on the same scale or in the same way as these big cities, rural America certainly has a number of artists. However, given the small populations of rural communities and, in some areas, their relative isolation from other towns or cities, one of the challenges for artists in rural areas has been establishing a community of artists. 

Rural America Contemporary Art (RACA) is an online movement that seeks to connect artists in rural areas of the United States. According to its website, RACA:

. . . aims to develop community among contemporary artists who live and create in rural America, and to be a positive, vibrant, stimulating voice for the evolving identity of the rural contemporary artist. RACA seeks to contribute to the whole of American contemporary art through a culture of discourse, inclusion, and aesthetic engagement.

Art of the Rural is another organization that gives voice to rural artists and allows them to create their own, evolving narrative of rural culture. Art of the Rural also seeks to bridge the rural-urban cultural divide by connecting with various communities through digital media. The organization also encourages people from diverse communities to participate in an ongoing dialogue on art, culture, and policy through various events and publications.

Some rural artists, such as painter Russell Ricks from rural Idaho, see their art as a way of "preserving" or documenting rurality. Toward this end, Russell Ricks travels to various regions to paint rural landscapes and landmarks. Brian Frink, the founder of RACA, seeks to narrate a piece of rural life and culture through painting his rural clients' pets. These are just a few of the many examples of persons giving voice to the community of artists in rural America.

The proliferation of art found in urban areas does not and should not suggest that rural areas lack or have a shortage of artists. Nor should it suggest that the urban artist is more progressive than the rural artist. Although spatial obstacles have presented and continue to present a challenge in the way of establishing an interactive community of rural artists, the internet has provided one way of alleviating that challenge. And although rural art may not be as conspicuous as urban art, rural art is very much alive.

Barn weddings pit neighbor against neighbor as new types of rural nuisance

The New York Times ran a front-page story today titled,  "Neighbors Say Barn Wedding Raise a Rumpus."  The dateline is Grant, Minnesota, population 4,096, and here's the lede for Julie Bosman's story:

For legions of young couples, there is no wedding venue more desirable than a barn in the country, with its unfussy vibe, picturesque setting and rural authenticity. 

For neighbors of the wedding barns, it is a summer-long agony.

Interesting in spite of that characterization--focus on "rural authenticity"--wikipedia labels Grant a "suburb of St. Paul."  It is in Washington County, population 246,603, part of the Minneapolis-St.Paul-Bloomington MN-WI metropolitan area.  One of the neighbors protesting the the wedding barn in Grant is quoted:

We moved out here for the rural nature, the quiet aspects of it, the open space.

In a similar vein, Bosman quotes Laurie Tulchin, "who lives in a rural part of Iowa City," population 70,000 and the fifth largest city in the state, " next door to a wedding barn."  

They blare music all night long, they have college students out there screaming, and everyone’s drinking.  Rural residents have quiet lifestyles. Sometimes I just think, ‘What the heck happened out here?’ 

Bosman's story continues:

In rural areas across the country, residents have protested that some barn owners flout zoning rules requiring that they operate only as agricultural enterprises. Unlike other businesses, the barns are often not inspected to ensure that they are up to code, and many lack proper sanitation, fire doors and sprinklers, accommodations for people with disabilities and licenses to serve liquor.

Barn owners often argue that these are agricultural enterprises in an era when family farms are rarely economically viable if they don't engage in some agritourism.    They say barn weddings are just a form of that tourism.

Both local government bodies and judges have gotten involved in different places, Bosman explains:

[C]ity council meetings have become stages for disputes in areas where friendly relations are the norm. Some small townships with ambiguous zoning laws have been forced to examine their regulations to figure out whether the wedding barns are legal.

* * * 

In some towns, judges have intervened, leaving trails of anguished soon-to-be-married couples. Last summer, a judge in St. Louis County, Mo., ruled that a historic barn on a property with a view of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers was a potential fire hazard, leaving a bride and groom who had scheduled a wedding reception there only days to make other plans.

Rurality Here and There, Then and Now (Part X): A defunct hillbilly amusement park and its (perhaps) urban namesake

Grounds of what was formerly Dogpatch U.S.A.
2012 Lisa R. Pruitt 

I can't believe I have been living in northern California, just 80 miles from San Francisco, for 15 years, and I just learned that there is a neighborhood in San Francisco called "Dogpatch."  I came across this fact quite by accident a few days ago while looking up a business in the city.  The little map that popped up with it indicated that the area is called Dogpatch.  Wikipedia described the competing theories for how the place got its name, and one of them is that "it was named after Dogpatch, the fictional middle-of-nowhere setting of cartoonist Al Capp's classic comic strip, Li'l Abner (1934–1977). A colloquialism of the time which described an underdeveloped backwater, Dogpatch was a primitive community "nestled in a bleak valley, between two cheap and uninteresting hills somewhere."

And that brings me to another Dogpatch, one from my childhood and youth.  Dogpatch U.S.A. operated for many years as an amusement park just about 10 miles from my home in northwest Arkansas.  I worked there for six summers as I was growing up, through my second year of college, if I recall correctly.  An earlier post about the park is here, indicating that it has been defunct for a number of years.   Another interesting coincidence about Dogpatch U.S.A.:  last month, Slate featured it in the Atlas Obscura, calling it a "hillbilly theme park that lies in ruins."  The excerpt on Slate starts with this back-handed, tongue in cheek compliment:

Though long abandoned, Dogpatch USA was arguably the country's most successful hillbilly-themed amusement park centered on a trout farm.

Sign marking what was formerly Dogpatch U.S.A.,
photo from 2012, by Lisa R. Pruitt

The park's predecessor was "the Raney family trout farm in Marble Falls, Arkansas," an attraction that remained even after Recreation Enterprises bought it and turned it into "a rustic theme park."  Visitors to Dogpatch could catch as much fish as they liked and pay just $1/pound to have it cleaned and packed on ice.

The hick motif was none-too-subtle: attractions included Barney Barnsmell's Skunk-Works, Rotten Ralphie's Rick-O-Shay Rifle Range, and a roller coaster called Earthquake McGoon's Brain Rattler. Instead of garbage cans, the park had "trash eaters"—mechanical pigs, goats, and wild hogs that would suck refuse from the hands of whoever fed them. ("Please feed the trash eaters," read the signs, "they gits hongry, too.")

* * * 

Despite all these delights, by the mid-1970s, the park was beginning to flounder. Rising interest rates, a national energy crisis, and the fading of hillbillies from pop culture all contributed to Dogpatch's financial troubles. 

* * * 

After being sold to new owners in 1981, and again in 1987, Dogpatch USA struggled on until 1993, when it closed for good. The park has since been left to ruin. A 2002 attempt to sell it on eBay for a million-dollar minimum bid drew no buyers.

Both of these finds have been, for me, a blast from the past.

The contemporary American West, in photos

See NPR's feature of Frontcountry, a new photo book by Lucas Foglia.  Chris Benderev describes the collection in his piece for NPR as "edited against" typical characterizations of the American West "in simple, iconic images: the cowboy, the miner, the farmer."  According to Foglia, "The pictures wander on purpose."

Foglia spent seven years with his camera, jumping from town to town, from New Mexico to Montana. He captures moments that distinguish the West from the rest of the country, as well as moments that could have happened anywhere in America. And then he mixes them all together.

The result is a collage of life and landscape — kids playing, a carved-out copper mine, a newborn calf, soccer practice, teens drinking in a snowbank.

But Wendy from Montana wrote in her comment on the story:

This doesn't look like it "wanders" very far. No college towns? No theatre events? No extreme skiing? No sushi in the park? No "March Against Monsanto"? No trivia night? Whitewater kayaking? No bike lanes? No no-profit worker on two phone lines at once, at her desk in front of two monitors? We are here. We are passionate, thinking people, engaged with the 21st century and we are the west also. -Wendy, from Montana (I do LOVE this picture of the woman running the hose over her head!)

Crystal Bridges Museum on quest to find undiscovered American artists

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas, April 2013

Randy Kennedy reports in the New York Times today under the headline, "Seeking U.S. Art All Over the Map.  Just Check GPS."  Kennedy reports that the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, established through an endowment from Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton, is planning a show for the fall of 2014 that "will inevitably be seen as a kind of heartland response to the Whitney Biennial."  To that end, Don Bacigalupi, the museum’s president, and Chad Alligood, a curator, have already "logged 50,000 miles visiting 500 artists in 30 states, and they ha[ve] almost 500 more artists to go."

 Kennedy provides this further context:  

The Whitney Biennial, the much-argued-about barometer of the country’s art, helped bring artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Jackson Pollock and Jeff Koons to prominence. Hoping to make their own discoveries of that caliber, Ms. Walton’s emissaries have looked high and low, sometimes literally. 

Possum Trot, Arkansas, a few miles from Ponca and
perhaps not labeled on most GPS software/units. 

During a trip to Portland, Ore., Mr. Bacigalupi was invited to an artist’s dark basement where she showed him a sculpture resembling a coffin and he momentarily feared for his safety. He and Mr. Alligood, a Harvard-trained curator who grew up in rural Georgia, have ventured to places so small the GPS has given up (a farm near the unincorporated town of Ponca, Ark.). They have seen art on a goat farm, in a soap factory, in a defunct pie factory. 

Read other posts about Crystal Bridges here and here.  Read other posts about Ponca, Arkansas, here, and environs here and here.  The photo left is of Possum Trot, just a few miles from Ponca.  

"Once the Villages are Gone, the Culture is Gone"

That is a quote from the latest of Ian Johnson's stories for the New York Times on the urbanization of China, a process which a major government push has recently accelerated.  The quote is from Feng Jicai, a well-known author and scholar who adds, “Chinese culture has traditionally been rural-based.”  As Johnson notes, urbanization is occurring "at a stunning rate."  China had 3.7 million villages in 2000, but that number dropped to 2.6 million a decade later according to research by Tianjin University. That is a loss of some 300 villages a day. Johnson elaborates:

China’s top leadership has equated urbanization with modernization and economic growth. Local governments are also promoting it, seeing the sale of rural land rights as a way to compensate for a weak tax base. Evicting residents and selling long-term leases to developers has become a favored method for local governments to balance budgets and local officials to line their pockets. Numerous local officials are under investigation for corruption linked to rural land sales. 

Destroying villages and their culture also reveals deeper biases. A common insult in China is to call someone a farmer, a word equated with backwardness and ignorance, while the most valued cultural traditions are elite practices like landscape painting, calligraphy and court music. 

But in recent years, Chinese scholars have begun to recognize the countryside’s vast cultural heritage. A mammoth government project has cataloged roughly 9,700 examples nationwide of “intangible cultural heritage,” fragile traditions like songs, dances, rituals, martial arts, cuisines and theater. About 80 percent of them are rural.

A Tennessee clothing factory, still doing things the old-fashioned way

Cathy Horyn reports in the New York Times today from Bristol, Tennessee, where the family-owned L.C. King Manufacturing Company has been doing its thing for a century now. The King Company's "thing" is making clothes and doing so the old-fashioned "cut and sew" way.  Horyn describes the company's bread and butter, which are sold under the label Pointer.

Pointer makes work clothes that are part of the rural South: a light canvas jacket worn into the field in the morning and removed as the sun rises, dungarees and overalls of various types depending on well-marked preferences: low-back in Kentucky, high-back in Georgia.

Aha! I knew I knew the Pointer brand from somewhere.  My grandfathers used to wear their products.  They were sold at the feed store, I think.  

Horyn had mentioned the Pointer brand in a story a few years back, reporting then that (an apparently famous designer) Junya Watanabe "had modified some Pointer jackets for his men’s line." Horyn observes:

These changes, funnily, were not unlike the careful and ingenious improvements that farmers used to make on their old clothes, except the Watanabe deluxe versions started at $800.

Before NAFTA, the company employed 130 workers. It is down to 28, several of which are pictured in this accompanying slide show.  Several of the workers say the factory is like home, and they are like family to one another.   

Horyn's story features lots of Appalachian atmospherics and is worth a read in its entirety.  

Bristol straddles the Tennessee-Virginia state line, in far eastern Tennessee. The city's population is 26,675, and it is in metropolitan Sullivan County.  

"Rural" in the movies a fiscal boon to a Georgia town

The headline for Robbie Brown's NYT story of a few days ago was "A Georgia Main Street Paved in Red Carpet," and the dateline is Senoia, Georgia, population 1738.

Brown writes of Senoia:

This is the quaint, small town that plays a quaint, small town on television and in the movies. Hollywood filmmakers come here when they need a Mayberry backdrop or a row of mom-and-pop storefronts. 

Senoia has been the site of movies such as "The Walking Dead" and "Drop Dead Diva" (which I admit to never having heard of!), "Sweet Home Alabama" and "Footloose."  It also provided the visual setting for Southern classics like "Fried Green Tomatoes" and "Driving Miss Daisy," which means Hollywood found the place several decades ago.  Senoia is just 25 miles from Atlanta, but a century away in appearance.

This has been good for the town in many ways, "with film crews bringing in money and publicity," permitting the town to "avoid[ ] the empty downtowns and shrinking tax bases that plague many rural towns. ... Property tax revenues have risen even though the city has lowered its tax rate."  Scott Tigchelaar, the president of Raleigh Studios Atlanta, a division of an international production company, is quoted:

Its been like turning on a fire hose of cash.

I hope Tigchelaar means this cash has been a boon for the town, and not only for his production company.  Brown reports that revenue brought into Georgia through filming soared to $879 million, up from $260 million in 2008.  Senoia doesn't charge filmmakers to use the locale, but counts on raising revenue through increased sales when film crews are in town.

Brown reports that Senoia's population has nearly doubled since 2000. While the town had only seven stores on mainstreet in 2006, it now has 49. But a lot of the property is now owned by outsiders like Tigchelaar, and others with big bucks to invest, including country music star Zac Brown. Journalist Brown calls the result "a Normal Rockwell setting for the newly rich." And Senoia, whose motto is "The Perfect Setting. For Life.," is trying to attract "empty-nesters from Atlanta and its wealthy suburbs" who seek the "simplicity of small-town living, with a Hollywood twist."

These changes have not pleased all residents.  Wayne Peavey, who owns an antique store, calls Senoia's growth " a double-edged sword," continuing: 

It’s good for business. But it’s not the small town I moved to.

Fighting "dollar stores" in Vermont, and losing

Vermont towns' battles against big box retailers such as Wal-Mart and Target are generally well-known, and have been the subject of earlier blog posts like this one.  Now the New York Times is reporting on a new retail scourge, chain dollar stores like those under the brands Dollar General, Dollar Tree and Family Dollar.   The dateline is Chester, Vermont, and Abby Goodnough reports here that the historic town known for its stone buildings is about to get its very own Dollar General, just down the street from the town common.  Because these stores tend to have much smaller footprints--the one in Chester will be 9,100 square feet--than big box stores, they are much less likely to run afoul of local zoning regulations.  The town's Development Review Board imposed 35 conditions on the Dollar General, including the requirement that the store have clapboard siding and that shopping carts be kept inside.  Here's an excerpt from the story:

[O]pponents [of the store] say that the Dollar General, which has opened 15 stores in Vermont in recent years, including one in Springfield, less than eight miles away, will be the beginning of the end for what might best be described as Chester's Vermontiness.  They theorize that second-home owners will abandon the town rather than abide a discount chain store, tourists in search of a bucolic escape will avoid it and Lisai's Market, the beloved local grocery store, will be forced out of business.   

"People come here and stay at the inns and eat at the restaurants not because we have Disney World but because we have Chester," said Claudio Veliz, an architect who moved here from New York.  "That is the hull of our boat, and Dollar General wants to put a fist through the hull."  

The population of Chester (a Census Designated Place) is 1,005 according to the Census Bureau's State and County Quick Facts, but wikipedia lists Chester's population as 3,044, and State and County Quick Facts lists the town's population as 3,154.  It is in nonmetropolitan Windsor County, which has a population of 56,670.

Photographing rural America

Luceo Images, a photographer-owned cooperative, recently funded a group documentary project on rural American called "Few and Far Between." The group project focuses on industrial and population changes in rural America. They write on their website that "[t]his change in industry, however, does not represent an overall repurposing of rural communities. Instead there has been a slow population decline in farming-based counties throughout the middle states of America offset by significant growth in Western states that boast alternative economies."

The photographers describe their work as challenging the preconceptions about a dwindling rural America. They acknowledge the shift in rural industry away from agriculture, but do not believe this indicates that rural America is losing its population. They seek to show through their photographs that this shift in industry has resulted in slow growth, fueled by an increasingly decentralized economy.

The project began in early 2010 during a photography trip to Lebanon, Kansas (population 218). You can see the photographs from the trip to Lebanon here. In late August of this year, the same five photographers continued to document life in rural America while traveling through Colorado, Wyoming, Montana, and Nevada in a rented RV.

Photograph from Luceo's Few and Far Between Project

The photographs taken during this trip show a real sense of joy that is present in rural America. The photographs are colorful and depict an active working community where the subjects are often smiling.  These images are a stark contrast to most rural photography, which typically depicts vast, empty landscapes or "hillbillies" seeming especially unhappy.

Shelby Lee Adams, a photographer who is best known for his images of rural Appalachia, is often criticized for his portrayal of life in Appalachia. Critics argue that his photography perpetuates negative stereotypes of rural America. The photograph below, called "The Hog Killing," is often used as an example of how Adams exploits rural stereotypes. In his blog, Adams admits to staging the slaughtered pig in the background. He also admits to sometimes staging the facial expressions of his subjects.

Photograph from Adams' Napier Family Portfolio

In a film about Adams' photography, entitled The True Meaning of Pictures: Shelby Lee Adams' Appalachia, Adams argues:

I'm photographing from a culture I'm from, I know about and I'm trying to express myself with that culture. So it's not an objective document, it's not an object. It's me, it's life and it's my subjects' lives who are my friends, who I love and care about.

Regardless of Adams' good intentions, Lucero and other rural communities are working to challenge these stereotypes. The University of Kentucky's Appalachian Center hosted a photography contest earlier this year, called "Re-Imaging Appalachia." The Center was looking for photographs that challenge the stereotype of Appalachia, perhaps in response to Adams's work. The finalists submitted photographs of bustling communities that are full of life and much less solemn than the Appalachia as depicted by Adams.

Lucero is hoping to continue documenting life in rural America are is trying to raise additional funds for the project by selling a handmade book that they describe as "one part travel scrapbook, one part personal documentation, one part fine art assemblage." The book contains artifacts and instant camera photographs compiled by each member during the road trip. It is a beautiful collection of found objects and other relics, displaying a very personal look at each member's experience traveling in the RV this past August. With a price tag of $3,500, it's tempting to schedule my own road trip to photograph rural America myself.

High art for the heartland (even if the venue isn't technically "rural")

I wrote about six weeks ago of an LA Times piece that characterized Bentonville, Arkansas, soon to be home to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, as "rural." Indeed, I fairly ridiculed the unidentified LA Times writer for that characterization , explaining how Bentonville can hardly be rural when it sits amidst a major metropolitan area.

Now the New York Times is writing about Crystal Bridges and Alice Walton, its benefactor. Here's an excerpt, heavy on quotes from Ms. Walton. The quotes take up the issue of "place," with some emphasis on the "heartland" versus the coasts, but with no mention of the "r" word.

“I never would have thought of collecting anything but American, truly,” she said. “This is the heartland of the country. It’s what should be here.”

Ms. Walton acknowledged that in the beginning it was not always easy dealing with members of the East Coast art establishment. “A lot of people there don’t really know this part of the world, really don’t know the people here and the desire and the need for art,” she said. “But once they come and see what’s here and what we have, their attitudes will change.”

Still, she is realistic enough to know that a world-class museum can’t be created overnight, or even over a decade. “We want to share; we want to borrow; we want to loan; we want to have really active partnerships with museums worldwide.”

Elsewhere in the story Ms. Walton, age 61 and the youngest child of the late Sam Walton, founder of Wal-Mart, is quoted:

For years I’ve been thinking about what we could do as a family that could really make a difference in this part of the world .... I thought this is something we desperately need, and what a difference it would have made were it here when I was growing up.

Seeing Appalachia through theatre

Sabrina Tavernise reported in the New York Times a few days ago about a series of plays set in Harlan County, Kentucky--coal country--plays that celebrate Appalachian culture. A professor at Southeastern Kentucky Community and Technical College, Robert Gipe, wrote the series, called "Higher Ground," which includes one called "Talking Dirt." In doing so, Gipe, an expert on Appalachia, collaborated with a folklorist and a music professor at the community college. Tavernise explains that Gipe had "grown weary of watching flip-chart presentations about the region’s problems. Their remedies were too sweeping, and their language, full of terms like “sustainable development,” were too lofty." Gipe says he was "interested in addressing issues, rather than endlessly naming them." A description of the plays follows:

The series, “Higher Ground,” describes in nuanced tones and local accents the hard realities of life here in Harlan, the heart of Kentucky coal country, which has been battered by decades of decline.
The title “Higher Ground” comes from the places communities flock to escape rising flood waters and is a metaphor for the monumental problems facing the area — drug abuse, strip mining, dwindling populations of young people.

Harlan County's 2009 population was 30,999, down from 33,202 in 2000. The county has lost half of its under-35 population since 1980. The rural brain part of the story reminds me of my own economically depressed home county where--for generations--young people left for jobs in cities, but where many return in their retirement.
Gipe says, "we have these hard things [like population loss] that we should talk about.” To do so, Gipe draws on a rural tradition of "getting together, telling stories and making music."

Piecing a life together: quilting, the Great (Rural) American Art.

Toad in the Puddle Block

On my recent flight across the country, as I was gazing out the airplane’s window, I looked down on vast stretches of sparsely populated farmland. The ground looked like a big patch-work quilt of browns, greens, and yellows. The scene reminded me of the short story, A Jury of Her Peers by early feminist writer Susan Glaspell. In that story, first published in 1916, the wives of the county’s important officials tag alongside their husbands to visit a murder scene. Apparently, a rural woman has killed her husband, nobody knows how or why. The women discover the causes of this tragedy by observing the details of the first floor of the house (i.e., the kitchen and the parlor), details which only a woman would understand, while the men fail to find any evidence pointing to a possible motive of the crime. In short, the men fail to understand the intricacies of this household's dynamics.

One of the key pieces of evidence the women understand is the quilt the lady of the house worked on. They notice that her quilt had some impeccably pieced squares but, all of a sudden, the work turned shoddy, as if the maker of the quilt had suddenly lost her touch with the quilt — and with reality. The story poignantly shows why rural women, in their solitary and frugal lives, had long embraced the tradition of quilting, used it not only for providing their families with warm blankets at no extra cost, but also for telling stories about their nearly invisible lives.

As a woman who learned knitting and crocheting, embroidered and sewed her own clothes at a very young age, I was intrigued by the importance of quilting to rural American culture as well as in the self-reliance it embodies.

Since time immemorial, rural women had a difficult life, often spent working from dawn till dusk to carve out a meager subsistence living. They did the best they could with very little. Warm blankets were expensive and fabric was scarce. Thus, rural quilts were made for everyday use by rural women out of necessity. Women made quilts from scraps of fabric, discarded clothing, or feed and flour sacks. Thus, the quilt serves as a metaphor for the myriad of ways in which discarded scraps and fragments can be pieced together into something whole, unified, and beautiful. Quilting represents the way that unimportant, trivial, and meaningless things can be made useful and — more importantly — valued.

Alice Walker also used the quilt metaphor in her early story, Everyday Use. Quilting and quilts describe African-American women's lives, which traditional history and literature have often ignored or misrepresented. The quilt in her story represents the passing of one’s maternal legacy onto the next generation by giving a long-treasured quilt to one’s daughters.

Women that worked on a quilt by themselves created an heirloom for their children and usually signed them. These quilts were a source of internal pride for rural women, but as typical of women of 19th century America, such as Aunt Jane, they did not consider a quilt a piece of art. The cultural norms of that era regarding modesty would have frowned upon any praise showered on a woman for either the object or the skill in creating a fine quilt. These social conventions of modesty inhibited expressions of pride.

Quilt making was slow and labor intensive, often taking months to complete. Rural women waited patiently for a stash of little scraps of fabric to accumulate, for them to make something out of nothing but a torn shirt, a discarded flour sack. Quilting manifests the slow passage of time, the monotony of days, years, and decades spent on the farm. Quilting was often a very solitary pursuit, but sometimes it was the only means for socialization with other women, called a quilting circle or quilting bee.

At the turn of the 19th century, Eliza (Lida) Calvert Hall penned a best-selling collection of short stories entitled Aunt Jane of Kentucky. American readers fell in love with the reoccurring central character of these stories: Aunt Jane, an old spinster woman living in a rural southern town who spent time ricollectin’ about the domestic nature of women’s lives to her young women visitors. Aunt Jane told them stories about quilts:

I've always had the name of being a good housekeeper, but when I'm dead and gone there ain't anybody going to think of the floors I've swept and the tables I've scrubbed, and the old clothes I've patched, and the stockings I've darned. But when one of my grandchildren or great-grandchildren sees one of these quilts, they'll think 'bout Aunt Jane and I'll know I ain't forgotten.

Eliza Calvert Hall, Aunt Jane of Kentucky (Lexington, Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky, 1995 reprint ed., at 78). Rural women could relate to Aunt Jane’s wisdom and saw themselves, too, as capable and creative persons who merely lacked opportunity to be valued at their true worth. As one of Aunt Jane’s guests says:

I looked again at the heap of quilts. An hour ago they had been patchwork, and nothing more. But now! The old woman's words had wrought a transformation in the homely mass of calico and silk and worsted. Patchwork? Ah, no! It was memory, imagination, history, biography, joy, sorrow, philosophy, religion, romance, realism, life, love, and death; and over all, like a halo, the love of the artist for his work and the soul's longing for earthly immortality.

Id. at 82.

Quilts from the last century had very rural names like Corn and Beans, Toad in A Puddle, and often explored biblical themes, such as the Star of Bethlehem. As Patricia Mainardi argues, quilting is the Great American Art, a women’s art, but, also, a very rural form of art. Again, the feminine and the rural are intertwined and forever linked.

What does a pickup truck have to do with Scott Brown's victory in Massacusetts?

I'm not sure, but here's the lede on the initial New York Times report of his victory over Martha Coakley.

Scott Brown, a little-known Republican state senator, rode an old pickup truck and a growing sense of unease among independent voters to an extraordinary upset Tuesday night when he was elected to fill the Senate seat that was long held by Edward M. Kennedy in the overwhelmingly Democratic state of Massachusetts.

What does the rural-urban divide--or rural-urban symbolism--have to do with this race? anything substantive?

Is this Brown victory being presented by the NYT as representing "rural" backlash against our urban President? I don't tend to think of Massachusetts as being a pick-up/farm kind of state, but there's plenty I don't know about New England. Or, maybe the NYT is just playing into rural-urban symbolism (a proxy for the culture wars after the 2008 Presidential election) with more prominence than is merited.

Photographic journey through America's backroads

Today CNN.com featured a photo slide show by renowned photographer Ed Ailor. Ailor retraced the steps of William Least Heat-Moon as written in his book, "Blue Highways." Ailor's book, to be called "Blue Highways Revisited," will include pictures from all the places visited and written about by Heat-Moon in his book. For a beautiful slide show that previews several of the photos, click here.


The reporters interviewed Heat-Moon about his traveling adventures. During the interview, Heat-Moon described two positive changes and two negative changes that he'd perceived in rural America throughout his travels. First, he claims that everywhere he travels, he notices an increase in human congestion. Moreover, where towns had "limits" before, now they are beginning to bleed together like "an inoperable cancer." Additionally, he claims that rural food has taken a huge hit. What used to be his greatest joy in traveling (eating regional food) now has become more challenging as corporate franchises are rapidly taking over in rural areas. While it can be beneficial to know what you're getting with big franchises, it's an ultimate disappointment not to visit an area and "get a meal that you will remember for years to come."

On the brighter side, Heat-Moon notes that racial harmony has improved over the last 25 years. Moreover, accommodations have improved so that travelers can visit almost anywhere and be able to find a bed to buy for the night. And, despite the "urban sprawl," Heat-Moon assures readers that, "there are still miles and miles of two-lane roads to take a traveler into recesses of America, where delights and amazements await."

After flipping through Ailor's photographs, I decided to look up some of the towns where the photographs were taken. The areas are extremely beautiful, yet extremely rural, as American Factfinder did not even have statistics on many of the areas. Here are the areas depicted in CNN's slide show:

Bell City, Louisiana - This city was not on the Factfinder, but I googled it and apparently it's a small unincorporated area outside of Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana.
Dime Box, Texas - This city was not on the Factfinder either but I found out Dime Box is in Lee County, a population of 15,657.
Frenchman, Nevada - This city was also not on the Factfinder. I looked this town up and found that it's in Churchill County, Nevada, a population of 23,982.
Lincoln City, Oregon - Population 7,437.
Kremlin, Montana - Population 126 (pictured below).

Tuftonboro, New Hampshire - Population 2,148.
Cape Neddick, Maine - Population 2,997.

Despite the urban sprawl, these beautiful rural areas still exist. Heat-Moon promises there are still areas that are unexplored in the United States. He also talks about how people in "today's" world move too fast. That makes me think that maybe it's not just that urban sprawl has begun to chip away at smaller, rural towns, but that human mentality is so clearly shifting toward a faster-pace lifestyle that we miss these rural gems. Or, perhaps we think they are unimportant. However, it seems that some of the most basic, enjoyable treasures can be found in rural America - good food, independently owned Bed & Breakfasts, small museums, family owned hardware stores, and other "mom and pop" shops. To save these marvels, maybe we all just need to slow down. As Heat-Moon says, "Speed corrupts travel far more than bad Chinese food."

More on clotheslines

They are the topic of today's Room for Debate on the New York Times website, "Rethinking Laundry in the 21st Century." Read other posts regarding the issue here and here.