America 250: Ten Small Towns That Made Us Who We Are

The history of America is written not only in its great cities and skyscrapers. It can be found in Appalachian hollows, along the banks of the Mississippi, in southwestern deserts and on the prairies of the High Plains. Small towns and rural communities have contributed much to the epic narrative of our nation. As we celebrate 250 years of American independence, it is worth looking back at some of the small towns which have made us who we are. While places like Selma, Alabama, and Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, are etched in the American memory, other small towns are just as consequential. These ten towns are worth remembering as we commemorate two and a half centuries of triumph and tribulation. Cane Ridge, Kentucky Many, if not most, of the megachurches of today and the small country chapels which dot the American landscape can trace their lineage back to Cane Ridge. The year was 1801, and what was intended to be a staid communion became the scene of one of the most consequential religious revivals not just of the Second Great Awakening, but in American history. Thousands flocked to Cane Ridge to hear fiery sermons from Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist preachers, according to the National Endowment for the Humanities. They were overcome by the emotion, falling to the ground with the ecstasy of atonement. Cane Ridge has been called “the most important religious gathering in all of American history,” birthing a new form of worship and new denominations, including the Disciples of Christ and Church of Christ, which spread across the country. The roots of modern evangelicalism are planted firmly in the bluegrass soil of Cane Ridge. Nauvoo, Illinois The early history of the Latter-Day Saints is one of persecution and resilience. After being expelled from Missouri, founder Joseph Smith and his followers fled to Illinois. There, in 1840, they renamed the town of Commerce to Nauvoo – Hebrew for “to be beautiful” – and set about developing their own religious community. Attracting Mormon converts from across the USA and Europe, Nauvoo grew to be the largest town in Illinois. This upset local non-Mormons, worried about the growing political power of this upstart religion. Eventually, Smith was assassinated and local vigilantes forced the church to leave Illinois, resulting in what became known as the Mormon Exodus. Eventually, followers of Smith’s successor, Brigham Young, would settle in Utah. There, the religion would flourish, shaping the culture of not just the Beehive State but the American West and becoming the first – and largest – religion born in the United States. Seneca Falls, New York It was July 9, 1848, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had had enough. At a tea hosted by Jane Hunt of Waterloo, New York, Stanton and the other women lamented the subservient role of women in American life. “I poured out, that day, the torrent of my long-accumulating discontent, with such vehemence and indignation that I stirred myself, as well as the rest of the party, to do and dare anything,” she recalled in her autobiography. Determined to change this, Stanton, along with the famed abolitionist Lucretia Mott and several other women, organized the first women’s rights convention in American history, giving rise to a movement that would forever change our nation. Their Declaration of Sentiments deliberately imitates the rhetorical style of the Declaration of Independence. It is a seminal document in American history; you can draw a straight line from Seneca Falls to the 19th Amendment to the MeToo movement. Titusville, Pennsylvania On August 27, 1859, Edwin L. Drake changed the world forever when, just outside Titusville, he drilled the world’s first successful oil well. Soon after, the nation’s first oil refinery opened in Titusville, and the area developed a notable natural gas industry by the 1870s. Titusville is the cradle of the American oil industry, but it represents something more: the fossil fuel boom that led to American might in the 20th and 21st centuries. Drake’s well reverberates through American history, from Henry Ford’s automobiles right on through to the current crisis in the Strait of Hormuz. Wounded Knee, South Dakota The federal government’s treatment of Native Americans is one of the most shameful aspects of American history, and no place represents this more tragically than Wounded Knee. After breaking treaty agreements and infringing on tribal lands, the government became concerned the Lakota would attack. What led to the 1890 massacre at Wounded Knee is a complicated and somewhat convoluted tale. What is certain is that federal soldiers began firing indiscriminately, killing nearly 300 Lakota, most of whom were unarmed civilians. Wounded Knee remains shorthand for the genocide of this nation’s indigenous population and the broken treaties and promises made to tribal citizens. Nearly a century later, in 1973, the American Indian Movement would occupy Wounded Knee, demanding a renegotiation of these treaties, demanding Native Americans be treated with fairness and equality. Tuskegee, Alabama One cannot overstate the importance of Tuskegee in the Black American experience. Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Normal School trained thousands of teachers to educate Black children in segregated schools while preparing thousands more freedmen and later generations of Black Americans to be self-sufficient in a world that would have them dependent on whites for their very livelihood. In doing so, he helped not only establish a blueprint for what would become the Historically Black Colleges and Universities across this country but in preparing generations of Black Americans to take on leadership roles in their communities and in our nation. Beyond this, Tuskegee was the home of the famed Tuskegee Airmen, the first squadron of Black pilots trained by the military. The 99th Fighter Squadron received three Distinguished Unit Citations during World War II. Their air superiority helped the Allies defeat the Nazis even while they themselves were second-class citizens in a segregated armed forces. Sadly, Tuskegee’s history cannot be told without mentioning the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. More than 100 Black men needlessly died because of an unethical study which withheld lifesaving treatment without the patient’s informed consent. It is a dark stain on our history, one revealing how routinely Black life – and Black accomplishments – have been devalued and discarded. Blair Mountain, West Virginia Founded in 1890, the United Mine Workers spent three decades failing to organize the coal camps of southern West Virginia. Miners there lived in company towns, and mine owners resisted unionization and would fire – which also meant evicting from their homes – any employee who tried to unionize. John L. Lewis vowed to change this when he became the UMW’s president in 1920. What resulted was a bitter dispute between mine owners and labor leaders, including the famed Mother Jones. It culminated in the Battle of Blair Mountain, the largest labor uprising in American history. The exact number of miners killed by state and federal law enforcement is debated, but the legacy of Blair Mountain is indisputable. The term “redneck” originates here, as the striking miners wore red bandanas to show solidarity. The battle itself led to the eventual unionization of the West Virginia coal mines and became a rallying cry for the American labor movement. Bristol, Tennessee/Virginia The “Big Bang of country music” happened in a small recording studio. It was 1927, and producer Ralph Peer travelled to a remote town straddling the Tennessee and Virginia border nestled in the Appalachian Mountains. The resulting Bristol Sessions launched the careers of the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, and with them, a genre of music that would come to define a nation. The recording industry and American music in general can trace its roots largely back to Bristol, the birthplace of country music. Artists from Elvis Presley to Dolly Parton to Taylor Swift owe a debt to Bristol, the small town that forever changed the way a nation sounds. Roswell, New Mexico In 1947, a rancher near Roswell, New Mexico found what many today still believe to be debris from a crashed flying saucer. Thus was born the UFO, and with it, a wellspring of conspiracy theories that last to this day. Roswell represents more than aliens and tin-foil hats. It came to represent the Space Age fascination with our cosmos, the secrecy of America’s rapidly expanding military, and a public distrust of official government accounts. Ruby Ridge, Idaho Randy Weaver, a self-professed white separatist, moved his family to Ruby Ridge – a remote area in the Idaho panhandle – to better live out his and his wife’s far-right Christian fundamentalist worldview. In 1992, Weaver was caught on tape agreeing to sell sawed-off shotguns to an undercover agent. The resulting standoff with federal agents lasted 11 days and ended with the death of a U.S. Marshal and of Weaver’s 14-year-old son, Samuel, and his wife, Vicki. Ruby Ridge remains a rallying cry for far-right, anti-government agitators to this day. Timothy McVeigh cited it as one of his reasons for the terrorist attack in Oklahoma City, and the anti-government sentiment of the Weavers spread through gun shows and internet forums in the 1990s and 2000s, helped fuel the Tea Party and eventually the MAGA movements. Our current political divisions can be traced in large part straight back to Ruby Ridge. Skylar Baker-Jordan is the editor of the Glasgow Courier in Glasgow, Montana.