by Emily Osment Davis
Small town life is more than charm, there is a deeper sense of community and kinship.
I started my first Saturday in my new hometown in rural Tennessee on a mission to explore it and take in all of the small-town charm. But first – coffee. What I came to find was that the town had no Starbucks, no Target, no long list of well-known restaurants. It would be a 40-minute round-trip drive just to get my iced shaken espresso. And that’s when it hit: I have officially left my comfortable Washington, D.C. orbit.
But you know what? That’s fine; I need to stiffen my weak citified spine.
What wasn’t fine was what I found out next. My new town had just been rocked by a massive local government corruption scandal. The mayor and two others were indicted on theft of funds, with the investigation claiming a whopping $450k was misused. The officials deny guilt, but the town reports a severe financial crisis. For a town this size, the loss of hundreds of thousands of dollars can be a death knell.
For decades, this small town has run on manufacturing and farming. One of those hollowed-out regions, this area was dealt a massive gut punch by Chinese tire imports and the 2009 Obama tariffs. And now, soybean farmers are affected by the Trump tariffs. Suffice it to say, it’s no stranger to economic volatility, whether at the local or federal level.
And as a result, the city announced this year that the town’s annual Soybean Festival would be canceled due to the financial crisis.
In the Washington, D.C. world I’ve observed, if a budget is blown in Congress, that’s usually a challenge to bloat it even more. But in small-town America, residents live within the confines of their town budgets. It has a direct impact. And for this town, that means foregoing the four-decade-long bright spot that unites families and the whole community, the Soybean Festival. For urbanites, it may sound trivial, but small town fairs are massive cultural and economic drivers, and this one is no different. It’s not only a morale booster, but something folks plan for all year long. And that’s why when the announcement came down, the community said, “Enough.”
In a plot twist that can only be found in films like “It’s a Wonderful Life,” one local man has rallied a groundswell of community support to bring the Festival back to life. Not by demanding they spend money they don’t have, but by organizing different people from all over the town and organizing organic fundraising. It may have started with one resident willing to make the first phone call, but it only worked because dozens of others answered it. Their grassroots festival will be a fraction of the grandeur of festivals before, but locals don’t care. As one person posted, “You do not even know how much it means to me and my family that y’all are trying keep Soybean alive. Now I can possibly bring my children to enjoy the same atmosphere.”
It struck me, I’ve been lamenting and making a list in my mind of how disconnected I am to all of the civic activity in the District, yet here I am confronted with democracy in action, and I’m missing it. As they say here in Tennessee, when something is right in front of your face: “if it was a snake — it would’ve bit me.”