Rural Vs. Urban

When political observers and other national media types talk about a rural-urban divide, they are normally talking about the difference between the way people in Podunk, Arkansas, for instance, see things compared to residents of New York City or Los Angeles. However, Susan Croce Kelly, in her recent book about legendary Springfield newspaperwoman Lucile Morris Upton, which I'm currently reading, makes the point that there was, at least during Lucile's time, a rural-urban divide even within the Ozarks.

And she's not talking about a divide just between country folk and people living in the larger towns or cities like Springfield. Ms. Kelly says that while many of Lucile's contemporaries during her youth and young adulthood identified more with the hills and valleys and woods and streams of their own farms than they did with the community down the road, Lucile strongly identified with the small town of Dadeville where she grew up. 

This observation made an impression on me because I realized that the same was true for me when I was growing up. I think many of my classmates at Fair Grove Schools, those who lived on farms, identified much more strongly with the land they and their families lived on than I did with the small plot of land in the town of Fair Grove where I and my family lived when I was growing up. 

The majority of my classmates were farm kids. Most of them did farm chores either before school, after school, or both. Many of the boys took agriculture classes and were active in FFA, while I was involved in those two pursuits only during my freshman year and only because taking ag was such a given in Fair Grove that nothing else was offered for me to take during the particular time slot that ag was offered. 

Don't get me wrong. I had nothing at all against agriculture or farming. In fact, I sometimes felt left out because I often didn't know what my classmates were talking about when they'd start talking about certain animals, or certain crops, or certain farming techniques. 

It's just that farming wasn't something I was really interested in and was not something I identified with. I was a town kid. Most of my best friends were boys who, like me, lived in the town of Fair Grove rather than classmates or people I met at school, although at least a couple were both pals from town and classmates.

During my childhood, from the time I was six or seven years old, my friends and I largely had the run of the town. The whole town, although initially it was just the south side, was our playground, from the feed room at the MFA Store to the little stream than ran by the old mill. I came to know not just all the kids in Fair Grove who were anywhere near my own age but also most of the adults, particularly the old-timers who used to sit on benches in front of the stores whittling, telling tall tales, and passing the time. 

As I got a little older and had more freedom to go wherever I wanted to, I got to know the town even better. This was especially true after I got to be about junior high age and started delivering newspapers and mowing lawns in Fair Grove. There were few people in Fair Grove whose yard I didn't mow or whose paper I didn't deliver, one or the other if not both.

So, I grew up strongly identifying with Fair Grove. Fair Grove the town, not Fair Grove the school. Oh, I identified with the school, too, but the town came first. It was the town first, then the school, and then my own home place, in that order. For many of my classmates, I suspect the order may have been exactly reversed. 

That's a revelation I really hadn't given much thought to until I read Ms. Kelly's statement about Lucile's attachment to Dadeville.