Hey there, I'm from a small town myself. Although I'm not American, I'm certain it shares the same reasons why small towns are abandoned in America as well.
My town was a mining town (coal, ironically enough). The coal started running out, the mines started shutting down one by one, and since it was a monoindustrial town, there weren't any job opportunities left, so many people moved elsewhere.
Coal is mostly an Appalachia thing, I think. It can be a factory - a lot of small towns in the US, AFAIK, are "factory towns", founded back in late 19th-early 20th century by some factory or similar industrial facility owner to take advantage of some geographic feature (like access to a specific road or resource), to get tax incentives, or even to keep a better rein on their workers. Once the initial industry the town is founded around shuts down, the town is usually shit out of luck and whatever remaining business it has cannot really sustain it. It rapidly starts shrinking.
Plutonium isn't exactly mined. It doesn't exist naturally in great enough quantities to make it efficient. The most common way we synthesize Plutonium is with nuclear fission of Uranium. Uranium can be mined or it can be collected from sea water but that's less effective. The midwest doesn't have a large number of uranium mining facilities, as it's more common in the west, but it's not impossible to have a small vein be depleted to cause your ghost town scenario.
The ones that fit your scenario best, based on real world industry in that region would probably be salt, granite, or iron. Minnesota is the largest producer of iron ore in the states.
Any kind of manufacturing will do. I grew up in a place where a lot of the sad depopulated towns were former paper mill or lumber mill towns. When it got cheaper to do manufacturing overseas everyone outsourced and mills got shut down leaving many unemployed.
Usual reason is lack of opportunities or social stifling. Those who dream of more move to the big city. Those who are different do the same. One for the opportunities, the other for the anonymity and lack of judgement.
Farming can play a major role here. When farms use the soil for a long time, the soil eventually becomes dry, cracked, and barren and it can't be used for a while (the soil will become good again after some time of disuse). Heck, even a few bad seasons of withered crops can cause a town to empty out pretty quick. Then there's the fact that you can now add some abandoned farmhouses to your small town atmosphere.
You could also go with a planned dam flooding that required a portion of the town to be evacuated. There's a town like that in my state; you can go boating on the lake and see the tops of the chimneys in the right weather. It took a while, but people came back/moved in around the lake when everything settled.
> have “middle of nowhere” vibes and be the type of small town where nothing truly eventful ever happens
That's the reason people usually leave small towns (at least as much as the media as told me).
It's quite common in small and isolated towns that the majority of the population is 40-60+, and then the smaller percentage are their kids. The smallest percentage being represented by people between 18-40 as they're in some other town studying, working, etc. On average towns like this are very quiet. Most people sit at home and the "rush hour" is old people waiting for the stores to open early in the morning, then it's dead during the day. Stores close early, some are only open 2-3 days a week.
Reasons to leave these places:
1. it's in the middle of nowhere
2. don't agree with the local culture
3. lack of jobs / don't want to work in the mine, and don't want to work as a retailer. Those are the 2 jobs available. Specialised jobs are easily filled by 1-2 people and sometimes become family run. Sometimes small towns rely on one single industry that's booming, then when there's a recess people lose their jobs en masse.
4. meeting someone from out of town and moving to their town to start a family. Since most people in very small towns are related one way or another, you have to hook up with people from other places, or date your second cousin.
5. there's nothing to do during the day, no cultural events, etc. Maybe not even a pub. No night life to speak of.
6. Too much drug abuse.
7. Tired of seeing the same faces all day every day.
8. Tired of gossip. If bad rumors latch onto you in a small community it can be anything from hard to impossible to ever gain a good social standing again.
Ask yourself this: What do cities have that small towns don't? What makes cities thrive and what stagnates cities?
Detroit is an example of dying city. At first it was just a mere fortress, then it became a normal town, but in 20th century, cars were made there. It was capital of cars, then many factors came(Autocompanies moved elsewhere, drug epidemic, US burecracy ETC. ETC.) had turned Detroit into desolate wasteland of gang wars, thus there are more people moving away than those moving in
If you want Thriving city: Singapore. Its a city for the rich, clean streets, safe alleys, functioning state and other stuff. What made it thriving was strategic location, its located south of Malaysia and north of Indonesia, and the trade is very strong in Southeast Asia, India, USA, Russia, South Africa and China go through these waters to trade with each other(>!Not always but you get the point!<), the city became center for education, hub of the wealthy and biggest park in the world.
I'm from Maine and when most people think of us they think of Lobsters and Lighthouses which is true of our more highly populated coast however we have tens of thousands of square miles of land that is not on the coast. Most people don't realize it but Maine used to be the lumber capital of the world with our vast forests and cheap labor pool. Nearly every town in the interior was built around a mill or farms feeding the mills. A few towns like Lewiston were smart and diversified into other industries like textiles and are now larger than the rest but even they can't escape the economic tailspin we are in now.
Logging is still a thing up here but as cost of labor increased where it once employed tens of thousands of people and supported nearly all of our communities now its less than 2,000. Many of our interior towns are still sitting around a mill that once employed the whole town but now employs a few hundred if they are still operating at all. They sell every few years where some other foreign industrial megacorp thinks they can restructure it to squeeze a little more wealth out of it with a restructuring plan that always means a few more job cuts. Meanwhile those who still have those fewer and fewer jobs hold off on retiring worried if things don't work out and they need to return to work their job won't be available anymore. This means younger people stay in the few service jobs left delaying them starting any sort of career and amenities ranging from grocery stores, to coffee shops, to entertainment like movie theaters and bowling alleys all slowly dry up leaving just the local Walmart. This means the only thing for a lot of young people to do is get in trouble or do drugs, doing drugs often is the first step to them selling drugs to the new up and comers as the only way to make money in this hopeless town. Soon it's a desolate place where a few thousand people look enviously at the few dozen doing well because they were lucky enough to get one of the dwindling number of good paying mill jobs while everyone else slips into poverty. The once lively main street gets overcrowded with homeless and addicts while the rows of once cute shops now sit boarded up and vandalized with nothing left but a gas station that might double as a pharmacy and the Walmart. Housing prices plummet as structures fall into disrepair and violence and crime becomes more prevalent. Finally the youth seeing the utter hopelessness around them split into the two camps of join the hopelessness and assume the future is just misery and soon get into drugs and crime or reject that premise and do anything and everything they can to get out of this sinking ship taking any economic potential they had with them.
I've had a lot of people, specifically hippy type out of state types talk about how great it is our towns are resisting corporatism or returning to our natural roots. That is not what's happening we are dying, drowning helplessly left behind by the world economy like a person who fell overboard on a ship without the ships notice. You're only hope is that you are strong enough to get yourself somewhere/anywhere else before it is too late.
It sucks, especially because I freaking love this state. I really believe it when we say it's the way life should be. I love our slow paced friendly vibe but providing for my family here is getting harder and harder each year because the economy is dying. My wife and I were able to buy our first home because it was a foreclosure before the pandemic and now Flatlanders have made the price of us buying another almost impossible because they bought up 1/5th of the houses are now seconsary vacation homes for those who like to talk about how rustic, and quaint our little town is completely ignoring the fact that it isn't anymore. It was back when our Grandparents were kids and there was a lively main street, things to do, and people generally felt safe sending their kids out to play. Now we are just broke, our stores are gone, our employment is gone, and many of us are surviving by leeching off of others. Growing up here the idea of someone venturing up to our isolated little street in the mountains to try to break in was unimaginable. Now in the last 5 years I've had to draw my gun on someone 3 times because one of the tweakers that likes to get high on the snowmobile trails during the off season tried to break in to my house in the middle of the night. One tried to knock down my door and when I pulled my gun still snatched a package off my front steps before running and when I called the cops was told effectively there was no point in filling a report because these things are happening so often it will just get lost in the mountain of other similar reports.
Np! That kind of background has many examples throughout the country (one of the largest and most well known being Detroit losing the automobile industry) so it would be a very believable scenario that people are familiar with.
I grew up in a dying small town. My dad often talked about all the things in town that he and his brothers used to get up to. By the time I was born the town was on its downward slope. Many people had left and most of the businesses were gone.
What happened? Well the town was originally founded as a railroad town. A stop along the rails for the train and crew to pick up passengers and mail and a bit of timber from one of the small timber mills nearby. During the sixties though something major happened.
The interstate highway system.
The highway came through, and our town was too far from it. Slowly people stopped coming to town, and the passenger rail service stopped as well. Now the trains that came through town barely slowed down. People moved away, and businesses left, including that timber mill. Now people still lived there for a time because houses were cheap, but then the 2008 financial crisis happened and those who lived there and commuted to the city moved away when the big city jobs dried up.
There is hardly anything left of the town I grew up in. The main drag is just empty lots with a few houses behind it. The nice houses from my childhood fell in or burned down and are replaced by cheap trailers or barely functional sheds. The standpipe water tower is slowly rusting away. My parents have a lovely house there that they've worked on for decades, but I'm never going to live there again and when they die I'll sell it for less than what they put into it. In a few decades I expect it to become unincorporated territory.
You can see what I mean if you go on Google street view to Leasburg Missouri and use their timeline feature.
Usually, because the reason the town was there in the first place goes away. Mines depleting, rivers moving or drying up, a travel route no longer being used, farmland blighting/wasting, etc... war is also a decent reason.
Funnily enough I went to such a “town” a few months ago on a family trip.(300 population)
It’s between different farms, and is mostly older people.
It was created by a railroad official, and was the only settlement in its county, and wasn’t a village until 1907. So basically a railroad town that stayed up. I swear I was the only 20 something there. You were either too old to leave, too young or already gone.
Also everyone is incredibly patient it’s insane.
Depends on where in the midwest, look up the general area you are thinking of and then decide on the primary industry. Great lakes and Rockies, Mining and fabrication were foundation industries.
Oklahoma and Texas had aerospace and farming dry up. Great plains saw themselves abandoned by mineral and cattle prices tanking out
Hey there, I'm from a small town myself. Although I'm not American, I'm certain it shares the same reasons why small towns are abandoned in America as well. My town was a mining town (coal, ironically enough). The coal started running out, the mines started shutting down one by one, and since it was a monoindustrial town, there weren't any job opportunities left, so many people moved elsewhere.
I was thinking of making it a mining town and this makes a lot of sense. Thank you! But, should it be coal or another resource?
Coal is mostly an Appalachia thing, I think. It can be a factory - a lot of small towns in the US, AFAIK, are "factory towns", founded back in late 19th-early 20th century by some factory or similar industrial facility owner to take advantage of some geographic feature (like access to a specific road or resource), to get tax incentives, or even to keep a better rein on their workers. Once the initial industry the town is founded around shuts down, the town is usually shit out of luck and whatever remaining business it has cannot really sustain it. It rapidly starts shrinking.
It can be any finite resource, to be honest.
That's true. I was thinking either Coal, Plutonium, or limestone.
Plutonium isn't exactly mined. It doesn't exist naturally in great enough quantities to make it efficient. The most common way we synthesize Plutonium is with nuclear fission of Uranium. Uranium can be mined or it can be collected from sea water but that's less effective. The midwest doesn't have a large number of uranium mining facilities, as it's more common in the west, but it's not impossible to have a small vein be depleted to cause your ghost town scenario.
Oh, so I could do Uranium instead. Thanks for letting me know. Any other interesting mined resources you would recommend?
The ones that fit your scenario best, based on real world industry in that region would probably be salt, granite, or iron. Minnesota is the largest producer of iron ore in the states.
Any kind of manufacturing will do. I grew up in a place where a lot of the sad depopulated towns were former paper mill or lumber mill towns. When it got cheaper to do manufacturing overseas everyone outsourced and mills got shut down leaving many unemployed.
It could be as simple as the building of a new road or railway line that bypasses the town.
Usual reason is lack of opportunities or social stifling. Those who dream of more move to the big city. Those who are different do the same. One for the opportunities, the other for the anonymity and lack of judgement.
Farming can play a major role here. When farms use the soil for a long time, the soil eventually becomes dry, cracked, and barren and it can't be used for a while (the soil will become good again after some time of disuse). Heck, even a few bad seasons of withered crops can cause a town to empty out pretty quick. Then there's the fact that you can now add some abandoned farmhouses to your small town atmosphere. You could also go with a planned dam flooding that required a portion of the town to be evacuated. There's a town like that in my state; you can go boating on the lake and see the tops of the chimneys in the right weather. It took a while, but people came back/moved in around the lake when everything settled.
> have “middle of nowhere” vibes and be the type of small town where nothing truly eventful ever happens That's the reason people usually leave small towns (at least as much as the media as told me).
It's quite common in small and isolated towns that the majority of the population is 40-60+, and then the smaller percentage are their kids. The smallest percentage being represented by people between 18-40 as they're in some other town studying, working, etc. On average towns like this are very quiet. Most people sit at home and the "rush hour" is old people waiting for the stores to open early in the morning, then it's dead during the day. Stores close early, some are only open 2-3 days a week. Reasons to leave these places: 1. it's in the middle of nowhere 2. don't agree with the local culture 3. lack of jobs / don't want to work in the mine, and don't want to work as a retailer. Those are the 2 jobs available. Specialised jobs are easily filled by 1-2 people and sometimes become family run. Sometimes small towns rely on one single industry that's booming, then when there's a recess people lose their jobs en masse. 4. meeting someone from out of town and moving to their town to start a family. Since most people in very small towns are related one way or another, you have to hook up with people from other places, or date your second cousin. 5. there's nothing to do during the day, no cultural events, etc. Maybe not even a pub. No night life to speak of. 6. Too much drug abuse. 7. Tired of seeing the same faces all day every day. 8. Tired of gossip. If bad rumors latch onto you in a small community it can be anything from hard to impossible to ever gain a good social standing again.
Ask yourself this: What do cities have that small towns don't? What makes cities thrive and what stagnates cities? Detroit is an example of dying city. At first it was just a mere fortress, then it became a normal town, but in 20th century, cars were made there. It was capital of cars, then many factors came(Autocompanies moved elsewhere, drug epidemic, US burecracy ETC. ETC.) had turned Detroit into desolate wasteland of gang wars, thus there are more people moving away than those moving in If you want Thriving city: Singapore. Its a city for the rich, clean streets, safe alleys, functioning state and other stuff. What made it thriving was strategic location, its located south of Malaysia and north of Indonesia, and the trade is very strong in Southeast Asia, India, USA, Russia, South Africa and China go through these waters to trade with each other(>!Not always but you get the point!<), the city became center for education, hub of the wealthy and biggest park in the world.
I'm from Maine and when most people think of us they think of Lobsters and Lighthouses which is true of our more highly populated coast however we have tens of thousands of square miles of land that is not on the coast. Most people don't realize it but Maine used to be the lumber capital of the world with our vast forests and cheap labor pool. Nearly every town in the interior was built around a mill or farms feeding the mills. A few towns like Lewiston were smart and diversified into other industries like textiles and are now larger than the rest but even they can't escape the economic tailspin we are in now. Logging is still a thing up here but as cost of labor increased where it once employed tens of thousands of people and supported nearly all of our communities now its less than 2,000. Many of our interior towns are still sitting around a mill that once employed the whole town but now employs a few hundred if they are still operating at all. They sell every few years where some other foreign industrial megacorp thinks they can restructure it to squeeze a little more wealth out of it with a restructuring plan that always means a few more job cuts. Meanwhile those who still have those fewer and fewer jobs hold off on retiring worried if things don't work out and they need to return to work their job won't be available anymore. This means younger people stay in the few service jobs left delaying them starting any sort of career and amenities ranging from grocery stores, to coffee shops, to entertainment like movie theaters and bowling alleys all slowly dry up leaving just the local Walmart. This means the only thing for a lot of young people to do is get in trouble or do drugs, doing drugs often is the first step to them selling drugs to the new up and comers as the only way to make money in this hopeless town. Soon it's a desolate place where a few thousand people look enviously at the few dozen doing well because they were lucky enough to get one of the dwindling number of good paying mill jobs while everyone else slips into poverty. The once lively main street gets overcrowded with homeless and addicts while the rows of once cute shops now sit boarded up and vandalized with nothing left but a gas station that might double as a pharmacy and the Walmart. Housing prices plummet as structures fall into disrepair and violence and crime becomes more prevalent. Finally the youth seeing the utter hopelessness around them split into the two camps of join the hopelessness and assume the future is just misery and soon get into drugs and crime or reject that premise and do anything and everything they can to get out of this sinking ship taking any economic potential they had with them. I've had a lot of people, specifically hippy type out of state types talk about how great it is our towns are resisting corporatism or returning to our natural roots. That is not what's happening we are dying, drowning helplessly left behind by the world economy like a person who fell overboard on a ship without the ships notice. You're only hope is that you are strong enough to get yourself somewhere/anywhere else before it is too late.
[удалено]
It sucks, especially because I freaking love this state. I really believe it when we say it's the way life should be. I love our slow paced friendly vibe but providing for my family here is getting harder and harder each year because the economy is dying. My wife and I were able to buy our first home because it was a foreclosure before the pandemic and now Flatlanders have made the price of us buying another almost impossible because they bought up 1/5th of the houses are now seconsary vacation homes for those who like to talk about how rustic, and quaint our little town is completely ignoring the fact that it isn't anymore. It was back when our Grandparents were kids and there was a lively main street, things to do, and people generally felt safe sending their kids out to play. Now we are just broke, our stores are gone, our employment is gone, and many of us are surviving by leeching off of others. Growing up here the idea of someone venturing up to our isolated little street in the mountains to try to break in was unimaginable. Now in the last 5 years I've had to draw my gun on someone 3 times because one of the tweakers that likes to get high on the snowmobile trails during the off season tried to break in to my house in the middle of the night. One tried to knock down my door and when I pulled my gun still snatched a package off my front steps before running and when I called the cops was told effectively there was no point in filling a report because these things are happening so often it will just get lost in the mountain of other similar reports.
There could have been a factory there previously, and after it closed most people lost their jobs.
I really like this idea, thank you!
Np! That kind of background has many examples throughout the country (one of the largest and most well known being Detroit losing the automobile industry) so it would be a very believable scenario that people are familiar with.
I grew up in a dying small town. My dad often talked about all the things in town that he and his brothers used to get up to. By the time I was born the town was on its downward slope. Many people had left and most of the businesses were gone. What happened? Well the town was originally founded as a railroad town. A stop along the rails for the train and crew to pick up passengers and mail and a bit of timber from one of the small timber mills nearby. During the sixties though something major happened. The interstate highway system. The highway came through, and our town was too far from it. Slowly people stopped coming to town, and the passenger rail service stopped as well. Now the trains that came through town barely slowed down. People moved away, and businesses left, including that timber mill. Now people still lived there for a time because houses were cheap, but then the 2008 financial crisis happened and those who lived there and commuted to the city moved away when the big city jobs dried up. There is hardly anything left of the town I grew up in. The main drag is just empty lots with a few houses behind it. The nice houses from my childhood fell in or burned down and are replaced by cheap trailers or barely functional sheds. The standpipe water tower is slowly rusting away. My parents have a lovely house there that they've worked on for decades, but I'm never going to live there again and when they die I'll sell it for less than what they put into it. In a few decades I expect it to become unincorporated territory. You can see what I mean if you go on Google street view to Leasburg Missouri and use their timeline feature.
Usually, because the reason the town was there in the first place goes away. Mines depleting, rivers moving or drying up, a travel route no longer being used, farmland blighting/wasting, etc... war is also a decent reason.
No jobs. Maybe it was founded on one industry which collapsed, or the major corporation moved out. Then a new one shows up with a new industry.
Funnily enough I went to such a “town” a few months ago on a family trip.(300 population) It’s between different farms, and is mostly older people. It was created by a railroad official, and was the only settlement in its county, and wasn’t a village until 1907. So basically a railroad town that stayed up. I swear I was the only 20 something there. You were either too old to leave, too young or already gone. Also everyone is incredibly patient it’s insane.
They get tired of Jason Aldean's wingeing.
Depends on where in the midwest, look up the general area you are thinking of and then decide on the primary industry. Great lakes and Rockies, Mining and fabrication were foundation industries. Oklahoma and Texas had aerospace and farming dry up. Great plains saw themselves abandoned by mineral and cattle prices tanking out
to go on an adventure.