A drive through portions of rural Midwest and Great Plains can be revealing to an urbanite. One can pass by old, abandoned farm houses and barns, crumbling like weathered gray gravestones in a long forgotten and overgrown cemetery--monuments to an earlier time, their adjoining individual land parcel consolidated into much larger agricultural ownership.
One also can drive into, and pass through literally in seconds, small farm towns, often bearing a few peeling paint houses, perhaps a gas station, maybe a tiny "oil can" elevated water storage tank, and a rusting, idle grain elevator along a long abandoned rail bed. Such towns were built and populated to serve all the farmers living in all the now abandoned farm houses years ago.
These scenes are not apparent from an interstate highway at 75 miles per hour. Rather, they are a reality available only from narrow two-lane roads which roll through the countryside like capillaries in an aging body--the "blue highways", as it once was stated.
For example, there is a small town in western Montana that was formed in 1912 as a farm products shipping point on the Great Northern railroad line. Today, the town in owned and populated by one family; the grocery store is a bed and breakfast; the bank is an antique shop; and the school house and the grain elevator are empty memories of past days.
Another town, larger and busier, is Browning, Montana located just east of Glacier National Park. Last August, a court ordered the receiver for the town to accept the offer of the Blackfeet Indian tribe, a creditor of the town, to purchase all of the infrastructure assets of the town to settle the claims of the tribe against the town.* Among the assets ordered to be transferred to the Tribe are all of the town's water and sewer infrastructure.
Today, there is a substantial national focus on the acknowledged need to replace and upgrade infrastructure, include water and waste water system assets. Estimates soar into billions of dollars as to the cost of of such work. There is talk of possible grant and loan programs as well as increasing rates to fund such work. However, how do small towns in rural areas, with their diminishing population and diminishing economic base, to afford infrastructure replacements and upgrades? This situation arises not only when farmers leave their farms and towns shrink. It also arises when a one factory or one business town suffers that factory or business closing. Who will think about of all this?
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* Kavanagh, "Judge Orders Denning To Accept
Blackfeet Tribe's Offer To Purchase Town
Of Browning's Assets," Glacier Reporter,
September 20, 2017, p.1
© Daniel J. Kucera 2018
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