Post-war growth overwhelmed small towns but never erased their symbolic appeal. Small towns began losing residents in the 1920s, but postwar educational opportunities lured still more, and younger, townspeople away. Sprawling suburban developments also transformed independent towns into mere bedroom communities for nearby cities, as new highways enabled routine commuting from residential neighborhoods created virtually overnight. Suburban tracts offered privacy and autonomy hitherto unattainable outside cities, while the relocation policies of corporate employers discouraged ambitious employees from forming any sentimental attachments to place. This postwar culture of education, mobility, growth and anonymity sapped the civic energy inter-generational connection and community feeling of small-town life.

Pre-war townspeople purchased a wide range of personal services from familiar merchants, shopkeepers and mechanics, many of whom began to close up in the 1960s and 1970s. New interstate highways bypassed thousands of towns, stranding “mom-andpop stores” that had traded with motorists traveling the local roads. New mass-market retailers offered large inventories of cheaper goods to local shoppers and tourists alike.

Unable to compete, local stores closed, diminishing the uniqueness that was each town’s pride and treasured inheritance.

Small-town services, neighborliness and civic unity had always involved uneven quality intrusiveness and unchallenged prejudice. But by the 1970s and 1980s, new suburban communities, with names like “Hometown,” “Pleasant Valley” and “Littleton,” traded on rosy nostalgia for small-town life. Developers of “new towns” featuring artificial centers with the same retailers that lined the interstates advertised a perfect mix of town-style community and suburban prestige, themes also seen in New Urbanism.

Surviving small towns began in the 1990s to assert their own version of the past, reaching out for tourist dollars by rediscovering local history and refurbishing fine old buildings. Nineteenth-century town boosters had eagerly exaggerated local get-up-and-go and promised that their growing town would be a new Colossus within the year. In the 1980s, town leaders, seeking new corporate and light industrial employers, sold their communities as quiet, traffic-free, family friendly and homogenous.

The poorest towns, lacking political strength, acquired the most problematic new economic resources. In the 1970s and 1980s, Appalachian towns, along with southern African American, southwestern Hispanic and Native American reservation towns, began spending local economic development funds to build facilities for imported hazardous waste. In the 1990s, as mandatory sentencing swelled the prison population, jobstarved towns also reached out for new federal prison-building contracts.

Visible reverse migration from cities to towns began in the 1980s, notably among African American families. Parents who had left southern towns for northern cities before 1940 saw their adult children return to look after elders or family land, or simply to escape what had not, after all, been a promised land up north.

Old towns, dead towns, ersatz towns and new towns cover the late-twentieth-century landscape. Though nothing has restored the pre-war American town, small-town life remains a compelling ideal.