Progress versus saving the past

An interesting article was published in the March 25, 2007, News and Observer titled "Is progress killing small towns?". Interesting to me because I grew up in the "small" town of Apex, and have arrived at a similar question about what progress has done to my home town and what it is like compared to it's past, in spite of efforts by the town board and planners to allegedly "preserve the small town atmosphere" here.

I agree completely with the idea suggested by the news article that progress is essentially destroying what has been referred to as "small town atmosphere" in much of the region and most of what was here is fading into the past.

I lived here from when I was born in 1943 through graduation from college in 1966, went into the Navy for a time and returned to a different part of North Carolina afterwards. After returning and living in Winston-Salem, NC, for a while, I was transferred to Virginia for thirty years and moved back here in 2002, a year after the factory I worked in was closed and all the jobs were exported to China. That's a story for another day, so for now I'll stick to the "progress killing small towns" issue at hand.

The town I knew while growing up was truly a small, southern town. It had a population of 2,000 or so when I left and was truly a small town by any standards. During the time I was gone the town began to grow during the time when growth accelerated in this part of the state and had grown to a population of some 33,000 by the time I returned. It simply was not the little country town it was when I left years ago.

Main street in Apex during the fifties and sixties was very much like it looks now and even the buildings look the same except for numerous attempts to make downtown look better and be more attractive to newer businesses and residents. Years ago downtown included a movie theater, corner drugstore, florist shop, insurance agency, beauty shop, barber shop, the "dime store", Western Auto, Martin's grocery, Beasley's grocery and supply, Baker's dry cleaners, an old closed up hardware store, the Apex fire station, a bank, an old corner gas station (complete with a pot bellied stove, gum and candy counter and ten cent cokes), a farm supply business, the old town hall, the local working train station and a Ford car dealership. And of course there is the railroad that has always run straight through the middle of town since it's begining. There were a few other stores near downtown and scattered nearby but these made up a majority of businesses in town. There were a couple of doctor and dentist offices and eventually the town was blessed to gain a small satellite hospital on the edge of town.

For the most part all of these businesses disappeared long ago (except for the insurance agency) and the original stores have been replaced by an assortment of small locally owned businesses that use the same buildings in much the same shape and appearance as they were in the past. The sidewalk has been widened and streetlights styled like gas-lights have been added. The street otherwise is much like it always was and still carries hundreds of cars through downtown each day and still has lots of eighteen wheeler trucks squeezing through town each day (even though they aren't supposed to be on the crowded street).

Although the old central part of town has been "preserved" and looks much like it did fifty years ago, new shopping areas and lots of typical commuter subdivisions have been built around town bringing in a new era of big-box shopping and conveniences of big city living. Much of the town is grid-locked from sunrise until dark every day with commuters rushing back and forth to employment centers in Raleigh, Durham and the Research Triangle Park areas. Even though there has been a little improvement in major outlying roads into and out of town, the town planners have not seen fit to push to replace the single old railroad "underpass" road through the south end of town so thousands of commuters passing through town now squeeze through many of the small streets in the older parts of town bringing modern day grid-lock to virtually every neighborhood. With recent completion of widening of highway NC 55 toward Durham and the other end toward Holly Springs the portion of this major state artery inside the city limits of Apex remains the only bottleneck in the path thousands of commuters and no plans have been made to rid the town of the reputation of being the worst traffic bottleneck in the southern Wake County.

In this little town there has been much talk of "preserving" the past and keeping the "look and feel" of what the town was like in times past. Part of the town has been declared a "Historic Area" in an attempt to keep at least those portions of town from dramatically changing. Unfortunately much of these parts of town have been changed by allowing construction of apartment buildings mixed adjascent to old homes and the roads in these areas have been allowed to overflow with a flood of daily commuter traffic. This has forever altered the character of even older Historic Area neighborhoods and they no longer reflect the quiet country living that once characterized the town.

As for the question as to whether "Progress is killing small towns" there isn't much left of the laid back style of living that was in this rural country town and most of the same observations can be made in many other similar "small towns" scattered around the region.

Read the N&O article for more about how much of the small town atmosphere has slipped away and what some communities are doing to try to bring back and protect some of the past "small-town character."

News and Observer
March 25, 2007
Jesse James DeConto, Staff Writer

Is progress killing small towns?

Small-town charm is now so rare in the Triangle, it has become a commodity.

Chambers of commerce use it in their marketing slogans, such as Wendell’s “Small Town Charm -- Capital City Connection.”

Some in Hillsborough have given it a name -- “smalltownliness” -- and they’re trying to sell the experience to tourists through a Web site, smallwander.com.

And the booming suburb of Morrisville aims to create an old-time Main Street feel where none ever existed.

As Triangle towns mesh into a single metropolitan area, no longer isolated from one another by forests and farmland, folks are striving to protect or recapture the small-town lifestyle. Read more...