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Photograph by Chris Naffziger
Edina Town Square.
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Photograph by Chris Naffziger
Edina Town Square.
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Photograph by Chris Naffziger
Italiante villa, Shelbina.
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Photograph by Chris Naffziger
Milan Town Square.
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Photograph by Chris Naffziger
Scotland County Courthouse, Memphis.
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Photograph by Chris Naffziger
Shelby County Courthouse, Shelbyville.
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Photograph by Chris Naffziger
Abandoned house, Shelbyville.
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Photograph by Chris Naffziger
Shelbyville Town Square.
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Photograph by Chris Naffziger
Sullivan County Courthouse, Milan.
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Photograph by Chris Naffziger
Vesper Place, Shelbina.
Last month, I visited my alma mater, Truman State University, located up in northeastern Missouri in Kirksville. It’s desolate out that way, and I don’t mean that as an insult, but just a statement of fact. Towns are small, located some distance from each other, and the mechanization of agriculture has caused farms to grow in size, limiting the need for the regular punctuation of the landscape with farmhouses and barns. Many of the farmers I know, who work these increasingly huge fields, live in town anyway. I’d been drawn back to these wide-open, hilly spaces of the region in the years since I moved back from the East Coast.
I charted a new path up to Kirksville, rather than the more direct route. There are a dozen county seats up that way, and each one is bedecked with a courthouse in the center of town. The major highways are kingmakers, so to speak, determining if a town will have another 1,000 to 10,000 people. It’s a bit of a lottery now that the railroads are contracting (I remember the rails being ripped in Kirksville while in college in the 1990s), and if a town doesn’t possess a major artery, it tends to be small. Carefully dodging all of the towns that contain a major highway, I charted my way up through a bevy of towns and counties with exotic and distant names: Milan, Scotland, Lancaster, Bethel.
What I found was simultaneously a validation and a confrontation of my preconceptions about the towns that lay only a half hour drive to where I lived for four influential years of my life. I jokingly christened the adventure my “Towns I Saw on the Weather Map in College but Never Visited Tour.” Shelbina, fortuitously sitting on both US Highway and still active rail-lines, seems to be doing fine, despite suffering a tragic loss by fire of one of the most unique small town commercial buildings I have seen. On the west side are stunners of the Italianate style: Vesper Place, perfectly restored, and an anonymous neighbor to the north straight out of the Godfather scenes in Sicily.
Edina, the county seat of Knox County, possesses a solid wall of one of what I think are most beautiful cast-iron commercial facades in America. It’s perfectly preserved, though a little loaded down with multiple layers of paint. Edina, as with many of the county seats in the area, sits high on a ridge, like, well, a Sicilian hill town. I know there used to be a large factory building in town, but it seems to have been torn down. North of there is Memphis, in the equally augustly named Scotland County. Again, perched high on a steep hill, a Beaux-Arts courthouse dominates the countryside right up by the Iowa state line.
Later on, I found myself driving out Route 6 to Milan, pronounced MY-lun. Sitting again, high up on a downright rugged hill, this county seat challenged my notions of rural America. There is a large Mexican-American immigrant influx in town, causing the city to do something that rarely happens up this way: register a population increase. Milan once chugged with the energy of the railroads; remnants of that industry still lie on the eastern end of town, at the bottom of the hill. I imagined men walking down the hill in the morning a hundred years ago, then walking back up the steep hill at the end of the day. It was interesting to see the town in person, having only in the past seen on the news one time back in 1999 a segment about how their reservoir was getting dangerously low due to a drought.
As I began to post these pictures with commentary on my St. Louis Patina site, I was humbled to receive correspondence from residents past and present thanking me for featuring their town. It seemed like everyone in Shelbina knew about my post with 24 hours of publishing it last Tuesday. But my resting on my laurels came crashing down when I began to receive much more critical, negative feedback from residents of a previously unmentioned county seat, Shelbyville, due north of Shelbina but lacking its neighbor’s road and rail connections. The general consensus seemed to be that I unfairly presented the town as a beat-up, run-down ghost town, in contrast to how many residents viewed their surroundings in a positive light. But simultaneously, one reader commented, “Main attractions [in Shelbyville] include smoking weed at the pool hall and smoking weed in the woods across the street from [the] pool hall.”
So what is the reality? Or are both realities valid? Historians and other social scientists are supposed to bring objectivity to what they are observing, but it is ever possible to completely eradicate personal bias from an analysis of any given event or location? I thought of this article, and how rural America has slowly drifted from the intellectual consciousness of the country, content with merely dismissing the countryside with a Beverly Hillbillies or Deliverance reference. In fact, I thought of my own recent coverage of the St. Louis Place neighborhood, and my earnest insistence that it is not merely a desolate crime-ridden warren of vacant lots and abandoned houses, but rather a close-knit community, worthy of compassion and understanding. Perhaps rural America deserves more of the same respect, and less of the condescension.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at naffziger@gmail.com.
