Lyon County villages were marked by the prominent mills, creameries or elevators that processed locally produced foodstuffs and by oil cooperatives, general stores, and veterinarians' hospitals that satisfied the consumer demands of those same farmers. Indeed, it has been asserted that the traditional small-town main street could not exist without "intensive levels of exchange, and a spatially focused population indoctrinated in the virtues of consumption." (25) The Tracy newspaper, The Tracy Headlight-Herald, advertised itself not simply as a newspaper but as an advertising venue, a means for the market to reach the citizens. The December 9, 1939 issue was an "Annual Christmas Shopping Edition," in which the entire front page was given over to a graphic of Santa Claus and a drumhead proclaiming "Tracy Welcomes You!" The December 12, 1941 issue had a banner headline: "Santa Will Visit Tracy Tomorrow"; underneath, in smaller font, the paper proclaimed "Italy and Germany Join Axis Partner By Declaring War On United States."
Within the context of commercial agriculture, the people who dwelt in small towns formed a distinct minority amongst the ebb and flow of market participants. Although Tracy, in the county's southeastern corner, grew up around the main switching station along the Chicago-Northwestern, all the towns in Lyon county experienced through the railroad connections to this wider world. (26) A daily round-trip train between Tracy and Watertown, South Dakota brought to Ghent shipments of "building materials as well as coal, oil, livestock, grain, machinery, groceries, etc." The local cooperate creamery sent back along the railroad a product not in high demand in Belgian-Catholic Ghent: kosher butter. (27) As the state highway system expanded, movement along the network shifted from rail-tracks to road-beds. Regardless of how the network penetrated towns, local politicians at least tackled head-on the subsequent importance of their localities within that web of movement. In 1939 the mayor of Tracy issued a proclamation calling on property owners and residents "to clean up and paint their premises. . . . your home grounds, boulevards, and back alleys are the front windows of our city to the stranger when visiting and travelling through Tracy. . . . a well kept place is always a mark of real community spirit." (28) The town was in this account itself absorbed within the idiom of Main Street, and its homes and businesses transformed into the front windows of local shops. As will be shown later, the profound connections between civic celebrations and local marketers made this equation of private life with public display a vital element in a consumer-oriented small-town identity.
Town identity was somewhat amorphous because of this focus on consumption and service: town dwellers tended to be people who served farm populations, yet relied themselves on markets further up the chain of national consumption. This was true even for people whose social status was above that of a common farmer (doctors, bankers, merchants), but whose lives were intertwined with the rhythms of farm life, both social and economic. When Herman Johnson, a dealer for Watkins Products in Lyon county, ferried 25 to 30 men from the Tracy region to the Watkins Plant in Winona to receive instructions on mineral feeding, he demonstrated how merchants envisioned their role as instructors of agricultural producers. (29) He also acted to protect his own economic interests, which were dependent on rural support.
The depression years of the 1930s brought falling commodity prices, successive drought years, and repeated locust infestations to Lyon county: the result was a severe blow to the purchasing power of the farmers on whom village merchants depended. This crisis and the townsfolk's response to it revealed the extent to which modern market forces remained in small-town communities deeply intertwined with a personalized exchange network. Consumption patterns in Lyon county were still marked by traditional patterns of exchange. Thus, more than one merchant during the depression eventually offered customers goods or services free of charge. The face-to-face exchange of small-town marketing had created a commercial sphere in which merchants told allowed their customers to take "whatever you really, really need, and 'that's all.'" (30) This practice arose in the context of sales by trade, a tradition even at the larger stores to allow farmers to buy on credit and redeem the debt with farm produce later. The general store in Minneota, in the northwest corner of Lyon county, a store that normally dealt only in dry goods, clothes, and shoes, once a year held a "poultry day," on which the store owners accepted poultry from local farmers to clear the farmers' accumulated debts, then sent the birds to be dressed in Tracy before their shipment to New York City. (31)
But the relationship between small towns and urban production was growing tighter throughout the first half of the twentieth century, and the result was a new type of small-town consumption. In few ways was this more apparent than in the growing importance of national brands. For the newspaper issued during the week of the Fourth of July, Tracy merchants placed an advertisement declaring that "Nationally Advertised Merchandise Leads the Parade!" Tracy merchants envisioned themselves as conduits of big-city values to the benighted rural population, and this advertisement emphasized the "nationally known" products and services "approved by national [Guilds]." (32) Consumer items became one more vehicle by which small towns linked themselves to modern networks, and the result was a rapid and apparently unopposed decline in more informal exchange relations.
National department store chains also focused small-town attentions on their relationship to the commercial network: when the Ford Department store of Tracy was purchased by an out-of-town businessman in 1939, he announced its new affiliation with the Federated Store of America, an association that declared each store to be "strictly home owned and home operated" while managing inventory under the supervision of a regional control superintendent. Unlike the general store in Minneota, the Federated Store in Tracy bought and sold "for cash only" and emphasized the values obtained "through quantity buying." (33) National producers also utilized local merchants to reach small-town consumers in ways which made consumption a public affair. The Spry Research Kitchen' sent a noted economist and lecturer' to Tracy to lead a three-day cooking school sponsored by the Minngas Company, Lever Bros., the O'Brien Theatre, and the Headlight-Herald. The cooking school was held over a period of three weeks in June 1939, involved the distribution of 50 door prizes including 15 bags of grocery and toilet articles, and culminated with the award of a "modern gas range, full size, completely insulated, with waist-high broiler, automatic oven control, and automatic top lighters." (34) At a time when contemporary advertisements and subsequent reminiscences made it clear that most Lyon county residents did not yet own gas ovens, a regional gas supplier and a national vegetable-shortening producer joined with local companies to alter women's consumption patterns. The commercial cooking school was held at the Tracy public high school.
The resulting sense of connection to a vast commercial network dominated the small-town landscape, through the structure of traffic patterns and the visual prominence of mercantile and agricultural structures. When in early 1940 the Tracy Headlight-Herald published a special insert celebrating the building boom in town of the past few years, the mayor in his front-page statement pointed to Tracy's location "in the center of a rich farming region" as a key component of economic growth totalling a quarter million dollars in new building and improvements in 1939 alone. (35) Among the new additions to the Tracy streetscape between 1926 and 1939 were a Standard Oil station, "a touch of the modern, yes, and the big city"; the WPA-funded and built sewage disposal plant; and the Tracy Produce Building, whose opening in 1939 had been marked by congratulatory advertisements placed by fellow merchants and by the construction companies whose products had gone into its construction. In a another quarter-page advertisement, Henry Thompson, who had done the brick and tile laying and cement work at Tracy Produce, congratulated R. J. Peifer for his new produce plant, "the finest in the Northwest. . . . a fine addition to the city and a distinct mark of progress." (36) The A. C. Ochs Brick and Tile Company declared the opening of the new Produce Building a sign that the town was "keeping pace with the times . . . Tracy's forward march."
The Produce Building, housing one of the largest employers in Lyon county, emphasized the small town's metropolitan-oriented role as way-station in commercial networks in the same way that the many general stores emphasized its rural orientation. During the summer months, when farmers worked long hours in the fields, town merchants in Tracy extended weekday shopping hours until 10pm on Wednesday nights to supplement regular late hours on Saturdays. On the first Wednesday of the new summer hours, the high school band performed and a track dance was held in the municipal building. A prior civic campaign to raise money for new band uniforms was extended and celebrated through the parade of the band on a retail occasion, with proceeds from the municipal dance dedicated to the uniform fund. (37) On special occasions when farmers might be expected to come to town late (for example, immediately before public holidays when the stores would be closed), townsfolk were asked to refrain from going onto main street in the evenings, in order to ease congestion and speed the farmers' movement through town.
The concern of towns to order spaces to meet the commercial needs of in-town marketers and country shoppers also extended to the political world. In 1939, Marshall enacted a two-hour parking ordinance in the business zone on Saturday, hoping to alleviate congestion on farm market days. The editor of the Tracy newspaper, whose interest in promoting Tracy trade perhaps influenced his half-hearted support for this ordinance, noted that "two hours goes fast when a farmer is doing his weekly shopping and visiting in town on Saturdays." To prevent giving offense to shoppers, the editor suggested instead that traffic police give courtesy tags to town car owners reminding them of "the need for cooperation in giving farm visitors and traders parking space"; it was explicitly assumed that the police would know the majority of businessmen's cars on sight. (38) Two years later, Tracy undertook a street-widening project to make more parking available near the district, and the newspaper editor of the Herald-Headlight suggested that several blocks along the city's schools, church lots, and city park sacrifice future sidewalks to improve access on days when country shoppers came to town. (39)
Unlike older towns to the east, whose layout more often placed civic or religious buildings at the center of public space, Midwestern towns in general and Lyon county towns in particular were laid out to privilege commercial sites. As one early sociologist disparagingly noted, "the location of the public buildings [in the average Midwestern town] almost never shows definite plan or produces any impression of civic unity. Most of the small towns of America are bisected by a railroad along which much of the ugliness concentrates." (40) These railroad lines dictated major points of intersection, and the commercial buildings of main street dominated the landscape. A town considered itself established when it could erect an impressive brick building on a green to serve as city hall, but the grain elevator on the railroad tracks made the greatest impact on small-town inhabitants. Long before the local columnist reported on troop movements and bomber shipments through the Cottonwood railroad junction, Lyon county residents had confronted through the railroads the world outside and their own position along an ever-pulsing network. (41)
Forward to "Nodes and Networks"
Return to "Modernity and Small Towns"
Return to Table of Contents
View Endnotes
http://www.oocities.org/jodyseim/papers/towns_space.htm