OHIOPYLE, Pennsylvania — Small-town America has a habit of punching well above its weight class.
Whether it is finding innovative ways to maintain a vibrant Main Street, no matter how large or small it is, to creating opportunities within the community to keep young people from moving away to finding ways to attract doctors to their town, small towns are always trying to find ways for their places to survive.
Often, this results from an abundance of optimism within the community. A recent survey of rural communities by SaveYourTown showed people who live in small rural communities said despite the ongoing problems of a lack of workers, support services, and stiff competition from the big online businesses, small-town folks were twice as likely to express optimism about their communities’ future as pessimism.
It’s a sentiment shared by the handful of full-time residents (less than 20) who call this Fayette County borough home. Their perseverance, sense of pride in place, and ability to make sure their small town shines under the weight of 1 million visitors a week certainly contributed to it being named the best small town in the northeast by USA Today.
The town is just a handful of blocks of small businesses: a couple of diners, a coffee shop, a couple of outfitters, a general store like the kind you used to see in every small town in America, a motor lodge complete with a putt-putt golf course, a brewery, and a scattering of homes, all nestled within the 20,000 acres of raw beauty that is Ohiopyle State Park.
Despite its tiny size, the town hosts over one million visitors every year who enjoy the Whitewater rafting, hikes along the Laurel Highland trails, or biking along the Great Allegheny Passage that leads to either Cumberland, Maryland, or Pittsburgh — or just sunbathing along the massive rocks settled here thanks to the glacier formations of the ice age.
America is a nation of small towns. According to Statista, there are well over 19,000 small towns (incorporated places) registered in the United States, of which over 16,000 of them had a 10,000 maximum population.
To put that in perspective, there are only 10 cities in this country that have a population of 1 million or more.
Dr. MeeCee Baker, who hails from the small town of Port Royal, Pennsylvania, population 500, says there is a reason nothing is more idealized in this country than small-town America: “That is because we are a nation of small towns.”
Baker, who has lived in the same small town for most of her life, has never let that smallness get in the way of great professional success. The Juniata County Democrat also has been a high school agriculture teacher, a Penn State student-teacher supervisor, and an executive officer in former Gov. Ed Rendell’s Department of Agriculture.
Baker now runs her own government affairs firm and is courted by Democrats in the White House and across the state for her expertise in agricultural, environmental, and rural issues, along with her small-town common sense.
“Like other people who live in a small town, I call Port Royal home because I am very deeply rooted here. I’ve lived in the same house 63 years, with the exception of a few years here and there for college,” she said, adding, “I think probably the No. 1 reason I stay here is that is my roots are so deep. You feel you belong here.”
Baker, who gets steamed every time New York Times columnist Paul Krugman pens yet another piece about the rural rage that he believes small-town America harbors, has given up on the invite she gave him to come spend a day with her in small-town America.
“I just don’t think anything is going to change his belief about what small-town America is,” she lamented.
Baker sets the scene of the sense of community she experiences every day in a conversation she had Thursday morning at a local coffee shop.
“I went in there this morning and there was a Mennonite couple in front of me, and the girl behind the counter was talking about growing organic produce,” she began.
“The old ag teacher in me has got to say, ‘Instead of thinking about organic, think about toxicity because some organic pesticides can be even more toxic than conventional or synthetic,’” she told the girl behind the counter.
By the end of that short discussion, the girl behind the counter called her the godmother of little tidbits of wisdom. “And it is just one example of the tiny microcommunities that make a small town, and we all learn from each other,” she said.
Elites don’t get this. For them, small towns often involve throwaway lines in a joke or in a book called Rural Rage that attempted to make bank on the ridicule of people different than them.
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Yet for much of the country, nothing is more venerated than small-town America.
Thankfully, that lack of proximity to power didn’t hinder this town of around 13 people year-round, didn’t hinder them from hosting a million of people from all over the world and making them feel as welcome as if they lived down the street — truly making Ohiopyle an example of America’s front porch.