Hidden Treasures in Your Town

by John Van Gieson

Published in Winter 2006 issue of NAR's publication On Common Ground

The similarities end, however, when it comes to planning for a future that will preserve each town's unique characteristics and provide economic opportunities for its residents. In that sense, Driggs and Elkhorn City are positioned at the polar extremes of the growth and planning issues affecting rural America.

Driggs is booming, attracting a mix of retirees, affluent second-home owners and resort workers looking for affordable housing - which is scarce to non-existent in Jackson Hole. If all the residences either proposed by developers or permissible under the current zoning code were built, the Teton County population would jump from about 6,000 to more than 40,000, said Kathy Rinaldi, operations director of Valley Advocates for Responsible Growth.

Driggs, Idaho attracts second-home owners and retirees

Elkhorn City has been sliding down a long backwards slope, losing nearly 3,500 residents over several decades as hard times in the coal and railroad industries battered the Eastern Kentucky economy.

Elkhorn City, Kentucky capitalizes on tourism

"Our economy was for years, and still is to some extent, coal-based, and the coal industry just doesn't have jobs," said Timothy Belcher, a local attorney who was instrumental in founding the Elkhorn City Area Heritage Council.

Fortunately for Driggs, Elkhorn City and countless other small towns in rural areas across the country, visionary planners, architects, academics and just plain local folks are working on visionary solutions to rural planning and growth issues. The Your Town program, which was started by the National Trust for Historic Preservation and is now run by the National Endowment for the Arts, holds numerous design workshops that bring concerned citizens and civic leaders together to discuss solutions to problems affecting their communities. Both Driggs and Elkhorn City hosted Your Town charettes.

"A lot of rural planning today is concentrated on two things: revitalizing decaying or deteriorating downtowns, and introducing new businesses on main street," said Shelley Mastran, a historic preservation consultant from Reston, Va., who worked for the National Trust. "The other side of the picture is trying to save small towns from being engulfed in sprawl. As metropolitan areas sprawl further and further out a lot of small towns just get sucked up and destroyed."

Kennedy Smith, a co-founder of the Community Land Use and Economics Group in Arlington, Va., is a former director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation's National Main Street Center. She is considered a leading expert on downtown revitalization.

"They believe they have one problem and in reality they often have several different problems," Smith said.

One of the keys to revitalizing the town center in small towns is to prevent commercial development on the skirts from sucking the life out of downtown businesses, Smith said. The construction of big box stores on the outskirts has doomed the downtown in many a small town. Revitalization planners must either devise strategies to discourage sprawl or develop specialized downtowns that offer different attractions than the huge chain stores.

A planning for the future approach that is working in many areas is "heritage tourism" - capitalizing on the small town community history or natural resources as a draw for visitors whose spending will stimulate local businesses. With Your Town's assistance, Elkhorn City is developing a river trail, promoting canoeing and kayaking on the river and hiking in the mountains, planning a Pioneer Village, developing an arts trail designed in part by a prominent Japanese artist, and emphasizing the area's role in Kentucky history.

"We're using art to effect social change and revitalization," Belcher said. As for history, "Daniel Boone's first step in Kentucky was actually in Elkhorn City," he said.

Also focusing on heritage tourism is the Mississippi Hills Heritage Area Alliance covering all or part of 30 counties in Northeast Mississippi. The area gave the nation an eclectic group of artists including Elvis Presley, Howlin' Wolf, Tammy Wynette, Tennessee Williams, William Faulkner and John Grisham. It was also the site of important Civil War battles where Union troops under General Ulysses S. Grant defeated Confederate forces.

"People care about their history, and they care about their heritage," said Kent Bain, coordinator of the Mississippi Hills Heritage Area Alliance. "If you can make them recognize what's important about the heritage of their community, then they want to preserve it. If you come in and say let's do some planning, then they want to run you out of town."

The Alliance operates out of space provided by REALTOR(r) Judy Glenn in her Corinth, Mississippi, office. Glenn is a former member of the NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF REALTORS(r) Board of Directors and currently serves on the Strategic Planning Committee. She was part of a group of Corinth leaders who decided more than 20 years ago that their town was deteriorating and needed to be revitalized.

"At that time we had problems," Glenn said. "On a block where there were five buildings probably two of them were occupied and three were vacant."

Now Corinth, population 15,000, has a vibrant downtown featuring regular free concerts at Courthouse Square, a marketplace written up in Southern Living magazine, a thriving community of artists and artisans, and a children's music conservatory. The National Park Service has constructed a new $9.5 million interpretive center at the Civil War battlefield park.

"There are places to eat now and live and work and play and interact downtown," Glenn said. "We don't have a Starbucks, but you can still get a cup of coffee in a downtown drug store that's been in business since the 1800s for 50 cents."

And Corinthians like to remind visitors that it is the home of the "slug burger," a local delicacy made of beef and breading deep fried to a golden brown.

Small town revitalization and attraction frequently involves capitalizing on the advantages that local folks know they have. In Valley, Alabama, however, a plan to develop a new downtown in a community that had lost numerous jobs when four textile mills closed focused on turning a local eyesore into an asset.

The Your Town Alabama program, a statewide revitalization program copied from but independent of the NEA's national Your Town program, was created in 1998 to provide assistance to struggling towns throughout Alabama.

"There are a lot of the little towns in Alabama that hit their economic heyday in the 1950s and 1960s," said Paul Kennedy, a U.S. Department of Agriculture natural resources manager on loan to the organization that runs Your Town Alabama. "Some downtown streets are 80 percent vacant. The kids when they graduate from high school run out of town as fast as they can. I wanted to do something to help them."

When Your Town Alabama held its first workshop in 1998, Valley City Clerk Martha Cato attended as a substitute for another official who couldn't go. The experience changed her life.

"We went to Your Town, and we found that planning was an answer for us," Cato said. "We totally give Your Town credit for putting us on the right path."

Valley was created 25 years ago by combining four communities along the banks of the Chattahoochee River that had fallen on hard times when their textile mills closed.

Planners who worked with Valley suggested the town, population 9,000, purchase the 500,000- square foot Langdale Mill, built in 1866, and convert into the centerpiece of a new downtown.

Langdale Mill

"Had we not gone though the Your Town process, we wouldn't have ever known how important that mill was to us," Valley Mayor Arnold Leak said in an interview with the Community Arts Network.

The town paid $300,000 for the mill and is planning to convert it into a hotel and convention center, restaurants, a regional farmers' market and condominiums. The project is going so well, that city leaders are now considering the purchase of a second mill.

Valley and Elkhorn City may be small towns, but their advocates think big.

Cato said Valley is developing a recreational trail along the river, is considering textile and railroad museums, and she is talking to officials in other states about developing an historic textile corridor along Interstate 85 from Alabama to Greenville, South Carolina.

Belcher dreams of a passenger train transporting tourists over scenic mountain railways between Kentucky and South Carolina.

Even Driggs, where the overarching issue is controlling growth, is taking advantage of its resources to promote the town to visitors. Self said the Teton River, just east of town, is known for its fine cutthroat trout fishing and birders come from far away to view the trumpeter swans and sand hill cranes along the river.

In fact, say revitalization advocates, there is no one right answer when it comes to revitalizing and preserving small towns and attracting new residents to the towns.

"I would say that people who are looking to revitalize or preserve their areas shouldn't be looking for a silver bullet," Glenn said. "They should look for a variety of things that can be put together as an incentive for all."

John Van Gieson is a freelance writer based in Tallahassee, Florida. He owns and runs Van Gieson Media Relations, Inc.