Postcards from the Heartland: Just a Stopping Place

Marysville, Kansas was founded in the 1850s as a trading post and a ferry terminal along the Oregon Trail. As settlers moved westward, Marysville prospered and farming took root. Today, however, it's not the bustling town it once was.

The sun was high and we were exhausted when we biked into Marysville, population 3000. The happening place, it seemed, was Marilyn's Diner, so our decision to stop for a bite of Marilyn's famous strawberry pie was none too difficult. The diner was packed with silver-haired ladies from the town's two senior centers. Our new friend Aline Toeder, whom we had met on the sidewalk out front, introduced us to some Marysville locals:

"And they bicycled from Seneca this morning. (From where?) Seneca. (Great!) Tomorrow they're going to Lincoln. (Wonderful! You're getting a little red; you might want to put some sunscreen on.) Am I? Yeah, I think I should. I did this morning, but there's so much sun out there. (Well, and the wind, too!)"

Aline was born in the area, moved to Topeka, and then returned after retirement. She said the town has changed significantly since WWII, from a thriving community of 4500 to just a spot on the map from which young people were fleeing. Back then, recalled Aline, there were many small businesses: a jewelry shop, a drugstore, two banks, two grocery stores and a farmer's market. Now most of these shops had been closed down, including the farmer's market. Whereas previously people either grew or bought most of their own food, now they buy it at the store.

And what businesses are left? Wal-Mart, chain stores, and a few token relics like the diner. Aline complained that when she buys sewing materials from Wal-Mart, she can only get them in huge quantities.

"We had hardware stores here— one time we had three, now we have none. In the same way we have sewing materials. You can't buy just a yard of elastic, say, but you have to go out there and buy a whole package. It's a waste."

Marysville, at a loss for economic pursuits, has recently turned for help from the National Trust Mainstreet Center, a nonprofit project working to revitalize historic commercial districts. Marysville Mainstreet decided to focus on generating tourism, but at this point, Aline explains, Marysville isn't even a tourist destination.

"The motels here they probably do a good business because we're about halfway between St. Joe and Denver—no, not halfway because it's five hundred miles on to Denver. I guess it's just a stopping place," said Aline Toeder.

With Aline's words "it's just a stopping place" ringing in our ears, we headed down the street to the Koester House Museum, a luxuriously-furnished 19th century Victorian formerly inhabited by a banking family. There the museum docents, John Howard and Evelyn Taylor, greeted us warmly and we sat down to chat in the old-fashioned kitchen. John and Evelyn seemed all too happy to have visitors to break up the long day sitting in the empty museum. John, a retired railroad employee, is among the folks trying to increase tourism in Marysville.

"Everywhere you look there's history, but we're not selling it. That's what we need to do and that's what we're going to do—is sell it," said John Howard.

It struck me as sad, almost sacrilege, that a town would have to turn its history into a commodity to survive. But according to John, there are few alternatives for people who want gainful employment. The traditional livelihood of this region, farming, is becoming more and more difficult unless one has money.

"That's the sad thing, its just sale after sale, auctioning off farms. There're just small farms going out every day. Every week there's several. (Who are they it selling to?) Mostly corporations, and big farmers. The corporations aren't so big here, but in Nebraska they finally passed a law there two years ago limiting what corporations could come in there. Prudential Insurance Company owns just acre after acre after acre up there. And they don't care. It's an investment to them. And they rent it out to big farmers. You don't have so much of that here, but you have the big farmers buying out the little guys and buying out the little guys and buying out the little guys. Because the little guy can't survive anymore because it takes a combine that'd cost you 200,000 dollars. A tractor big enough to farm any ground at all will cost you anywhere from 60,000 to 150,00 dollars. Well, man you got to grow a lot of corn to pay that off! Where that big guy can buy the biggest equipment they make and farm all them farms with the one piece of equipment, where each one of them five farms before had to have one of them. That's what's going on here. The big farmers are waiting for that land to come up, and it shows because they're willing to pay far above what the land is worth, just to get it," said John Howard.

John was referring to Initiative 300, an anti-corporate farming law passed by Nebraskans in 1982. Today, big business interests are seeking to challenge Initiative 300’s constitutionality.

Listening to John's words I was reminded of scenes Katharine and I frequently noticed as we biked through Kansas—dusty machine graveyards and topsoil-choked streams, telltale remnants from the race for higher and higher yields.

In addition to prohibitive land prices, expensive machinery and low returns, grain storage and shipping is also biased against today's small farmer. According to John, the local grain elevators have been bought up by large companies which process, market and transport grain. Although the website for one of these companies -- AG Processing -- boasts that the company is a "farmer-owned cooperative," John says this there's nothing cooperative about large grain elevators these days.

One of the many grain elevators dotting the Midwest landscape. A tornado had passed through southern Nebraska just a few days before we bicycled there, leaving a trail of crushed elevators in its wake.

John told me that a company often buys three of the local elevators, then, to establish a monopoly, closes two of them. The small farmer must haul her grain further than before because the company rail lines no longer stop at the smaller elevators to buy 10-25 cars of product. They only stop at the large ones where they can pick up 110 or more cars.

By the time we got ready to leave, our hosts were treating us almost like family. They repeatedly implored us to stay in touch, and Evelyn called out “We love you!” as we biked away.

The Koester House museum, like the small grain elevators and like the town of Marysville itself, was a relic all but forgotten by the present. Yet this is a place in which the memories run as thick and sticky as corn syrup. These memories cannot be washed away easily.

Back at the diner, Aline had offered to drive us down the road to visit John Schwartz, a long-time conventional farmer. Katharine and I took her up on it, and soon found ourselves seated with Mr. Schwartz and his wife on cushy living room sofas in a cozy room decorated with homey trinkets. Mrs. Schwartz spoke very little as her husband told us what changes he'd seen in agriculture over the years.

"Course one marked thing is when you plant with horses you had a 10 or a 8 hour, 9 hour day. Now the right season these younger farmers work about a 16-hour day. If you sleep 6 7 8 hours the rest of the time you're on the go. Some of them hardly take time to sleep! They get yields of corn up to 200 bushels/acre, where we used to think 55, 60 was a top yield. So they've improved a lot, but they've improved the costs right along with it!" said Schwartz.

Mr. Schwartz called farming nowadays "a modern business with lots of investment." According to him, young farmers today consult their wives on cell phones from air-conditioned combines to access computerized histories of their fields.

We asked the veteran farmer what he thought of the widespread use of fertilizers in agriculture today, and he seemed to have no qualms about the environmental effects. But even Mr. Schwartz felt uncertain that crop yields would continue to increase.

The majority of corn grown in the U.S. becomes animal feed. Read about Ohio farmer Gene Logsdon's alternative to mechanized grain production.

As we headed back to Marysville we passed a part of town very unlike the historic area. Here the road was lined with the same chain stores we'd found in most other rural towns: Taco Bell, Sonic Drive-In, China Buffet and Pizza Hut. It's at these places, not at the diner, that you'll find all the young people.

We asked them what they thought of life in Marysville:

"What kinds of things do you do around here on a Saturday night?) Sex, money and drugs. My Saturday night consists of drinking beer and chasing girls. That's about it. But seriously, there's not much to do around here. This is what we do here on a Saturday night. You see those people driving up and down the street? That's what they do all night. And all the towns surrounding this town that's all they do, too. (Are you going to live here all your life?) F*** no! No, we're not. I'm moving to Amsterdam. (What would it take to get young people to stay in small towns? What would make it more fun here?) If they had more street dances, and stuff like that, that would be better. It would, actually, on the mainstreets. If they just had bands up on the streets and stuff, that would keep kids out of trouble from driving down country roads and wrecking up bridges. There's never any music around Marysville. This is what I do. When I want something to do, I go fishing. Fishing's fun. (Anything else about small towns we should know?) THEY SUCK!"

Clearly, these kids will not be attracted to a remake of their parents' culture. If I were born in a small town and Marilyn's was all there was, I'd leave, too. Young people crave an opportunity for creative expression, for something hip and new. Searching for an identity of their own, kids glom on to the identity the corporation that owns Sonic Drive-In sells them.

But I couldn't help speculating that the same chain stores on the outskirts of town that attract the younger generation are also driving them away from their communities. How appealing is a service sector job at Taco Bell, at Wal-Mart, or at Marysville's Pepsi Cola Bottling Company? These low-paying jobs rarely satisfy college-educated youth looking for decent livelihoods.

It's not a surprise that rural families trying to make ends meet are drawn to Wal-Mart's rock-bottom prices. The irony, however, is that these same supply chains, by selling food products derived from the cheapest sources -- inevitably large-scale industrial farms -- are in many cases the reason the lifeblood is being drained from communities like Marysville.

Lacking land or capital, a young person looking to farm a plot of her own is out of luck. And with other opportunities for self-employment negligible, staying in Marysville must feel like a dead-end.

For most young people, Marysville will be just a stopping place on their way to the city.

Read Part III