Abstract
Small towns have long occupied an important symbolic position in American culture. They have been frequently (and one might argue accurately) represented as tight-knit, even stifling communities from which the best and brightest do their best to escape. Since the mid-twentieth century at least, confronted with a social and economic decline that continues strongly into the present day, they have also been regarded nostalgically, as fading centers of an American heartland, the seat of the values of community and of a unique ‘Americanness’ being lost in the tide of change. As these communities have diminished, a veritable cottage industry of commemorative albums has appeared in small towns across the United States, often increasing in volume and scope as the town’s livelihood dwindles. While these volumes can be seen simply as antiquarian curiosities, attempts to set into aspic the ephemera of a vanishing way of life, they can also be regarded as valuable expressions of memory of what are remembered as better times in declining communities once seen as the backbone of American society, the home of that powerful American cultural metaphor, Main Street. The purpose of this paper is to examine three such albums produced between 1960 and 2010 in one small town, Marseilles, Illinois, a community in the American Midwest region, (the so-called “heartland” of the United States), with a view to examining the way a rather unremarkable small Midwestern town has celebrated its memory in a reconstruction an idealized image of its own past as reassurance in a troubling present.
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Notes
- 1.
Cognoscenti might consider the addition of tater tots to this casserole.
- 2.
Middletown was a consciously chosen ‘generic’ name for Muncie, Indiana.
- 3.
Lingeman's characterizations of small town social life are based at least in part on the sociological community studies of W. Lloyd Warner and his study of small town life in Morris, Illinois, published in 1947 under the title Jonesville. Morris is located 19 miles (ca. 30 km) east of Marseilles down the Illinois River and US Route 6. That these followed in the footsteps of Middletown in seeking another Midwestern location, seems significant, though Warner is better known for his less ‘typical’ study of Newburyport, Massachusetts. See Connolly (2005), p. 219.
- 4.
To this day, the division between ‘local’ and ‘hillbilly’ remains perceptible in Marseilles, with some residents derisively referring to those with roots in Kentucky as residing in a separate parallel town, called “Martucky”, and protesting that not all town residents are ‘hicks,’ reflecting the more general ‘nice people’ versus ‘not nice’ class divide.
- 5.
It does survive in living memory, however. The author’s grandmother grew up in Marseilles and, after training in Chicago and working in St. Louis, returned and worked for the community nursing service in the 1940s. She rarely spoke of the young girls who worked for Radium Dial in Ottawa, which operated there in the 1920s and 1930s, and only in outraged and pained tones of the illnesses some of them suffered from.
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Wood, K. (2019). “The Best Town by a Dam-Site:” Celebrating Memory in a Midwestern Small Town. In: Mianowski, J., Borodo, M., Schreiber, P. (eds) Memory, Identity and Cognition: Explorations in Culture and Communication. Second Language Learning and Teaching(). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-12590-5_7
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