Iowa’s unique sort of rural poverty
Coming from relatively prosperous Iowa, I continue to be stunned by the scenes of grinding rural poverty when you get off the freeways and revisit Hwy. 61 or its cousins.
Drive the edge of gorgeous Mark Twain National Forest enroute from Jonesboro, Ark., to the Gateway to the Ozarks, Poplar Bluff, Mo., where the downtown is dead empty on a Saturday afternoon but for an open sports bar with no customers. A sign on the bar proclaims it is doing what it can to save the downtown.
The action is out on the highway in a town of 16,000 whose population steadily declined since 1980, set in the prettiest hills you could behold.
Shacks line the road in Arkansas, Black and White folks. You see the same in South Dakota off Interstate 90 (substitute Native American for Black), or in eastern Colorado, or in a Kansas cowtown time and progress passed by.
You get back to Iowa where the farmsteads look better, the dirt blacker, the machinery shinier. Yet the rust sets in here, too.
Nationally, the rural poverty rate is about 15% compared to an urban rate of about 11%. Those statistics do not reflect the extremes you see in the little burgs waylaid by the freeways.
Here, in northern Iowa, rural areas simply emptied out while wealth remained in the land. We had the education and the means to go someplace else. Population consolidated around Fort Dodge and Storm Lake, and left Calhoun County with a 38% drop in population since 1980 (16,000 down to 10,000). The poverty rate is 9%, below the state average of 11%, thanks to retired farmers. The big employer is the prison in Rockwell City, an industry on the upswing.
In Pomeroy, downtown is about to fall down from abandonment. The only business is Byron’s Bar, which is on notice from the city to shore up or clear out. The rest of the building block attached to the bar is vacant and derelict, and is bound to pull down Byron’s if the dozer doesn’t beat it to the mark.
Byron Stuart, the owner, would move if he could but there are no habitable buildings apparently available. Everything has a hole in it beyond his means.
Pomeroy’s population peaked in 1900 at 910. By 1980 it was hanging in there at 895. By 2020 the population dropped nearly in half, to 526. The school closed, and nobody seems to know what to do with the complex. The only solution for downtown appears to be a bulldozer.
That’s a poverty of its own sort.
I would bet if you gave downtown Pomeroy to 20 Mexican or Asian families and told them to bring the buildings up to code it would be done in a matter of weeks. The German immigrants who built the town did just that. You could say the automobile drove the demise. Or the farm consolidation. Or the big box stores in Fort Dodge. Or the school closing. Or not bearing an attachment to your place.
Downtown Pomeroy lost its reason for being, just like so many other Iowa villages. Chuck Offenburger just wrote a column on Substack about Tenville in Southwest Iowa that used to hop at the junction of Hwys. 71 & 34 until I-80 came along. Twenty-nine people remain but the cafe is gone. What are you to do?
In New Orleans they buttress old buildings with exterior beams. Here we bulldoze them. In a state that’s worth its salt, one would think there is a practical way to prop up the one cultural oasis in rural Northwest Iowa. Where else can you hear decent live music every Sunday? Byron’s is an icon in Iowa. The city council has not been a great help, but it has been patient. The mayor has tried. Means are limited. We have let so much go across Iowa that is now unsalvageable. State officials have come to visit but have offered no structural engineer. Byron’s loyal patrons have raised a fair amount on his behalf, but not nearly enough to build something new for a bartender in his seventh decade.
The choices are boiling down to closing Byron’s or moving to another town with an empty bar whose roof won’t fall in within the decade. Byron wants to stay in Pomeroy, understandably, because he actually does have an attachment to the place. The town could decide to help Byron maintain the 1896 building he is in. The patrons have stepped up. Who cares what it looks like? They don’t make it easy for the man who keeps the little burg on the map. That’s how you induce rural poverty in Iowa, the richest place in the world. It isn’t just about the money.
Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.
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Not to be Pollyannish, but Lyle Muller and I did a series for IowaWatch/Investigate Midwest in 2021-22 about several small towns who are managing to maintain their quality of life despite static population growth. There are several "Shrink Smart" communities working with Iowa State University and the Iowa League of Cities on this. One is Bancroft, where I discovered your grandfather helped build the baseball stadium. :) There's also a very strong rural Mennonite community all around the city of Elma that has helped them quite a bit. Here's the lead story in the series: https://investigatemidwest.org/2021/08/26/small-towns-featured/ Others are on the Investigate Midwest website.
Art Cullen, that is a brilliant idea, giving the dying small towns to immigrants, brilliant! How can it be accomplished? Your bet is so right. They would bring those places back to life.