Small Town Names

For they gave their sons and fathers

For the last 8 years or so every place I’ve ever worked has put me behind the driver’s seat and sent me off on the open road. Whether it was interviewing new clients at the county jail, or driving far off for various non-profit programs I’ve worked on and for over thousands if not tens of thousands of various country roads and highways. Where I work now I will not say, but I am still behind the wheel of a car visiting various small towns and driving for hours on end working with local government officials to get the money and the planning that they need to make sure their communities grow and succeed.

I like my job, even if there are times where I sit in on various “Five Year Strategic Planning” meetings that reinforce my beliefs that Stalin and Communism won the War, and the cold one that followed. Nothing triggers the edgy, immature 21 year old libertarian in me like working in and around local government. America, or at least the part of America that I live in doesn’t have “the shire”, although it has those picturesque historic downtowns with tall brick and mortar churches, a still vibrant downtown space, although its equivalent of Breezewood is just a few miles down the road.

These places still feel like America in 2025, and for better and for worse they are still some of the most neglected parts of the country. Even smaller cities I’ve lived in have had this problem, I recall one time a city councilman was giving a public address and wanted to do everything in his power to stop the city of El Paso from being a place “kids dream of leaving.” Last I checked it still very much was, and I couldn’t see myself going back lest providence guides me to be this century’s Samuel Chamberlain. While I don’t see that in the cards for myself, every meeting with community leaders, educators, clerks, mayors, etc., are all asking the same question, about how to invest in the future, their children, and to make their town a better more livable place. Most of the time when I’m at these meetings I’m usually very frustrated, as my cohorts (mainly Gen X and Baby Boomers) really have no idea how rough it is out there for their communities and for anyone under 30 who didn’t get the heck out of dodge, only to come back with money or a law degree to start a practice there.

While everyone at these meetings is usually 15 to 35 years my senior, I felt the need to speak up to retardation that had taken place during covid, that most don’t see the refinery jobs either lasting or worth doing, and that the trades market is oversaturated primarily with cheap labor from very literal ethnic competition. While tense, the conversation always returned to infrastructure, rather than anything cultural or actual policy, caked over with soft platitudes about the future and making the region “a more marketable place.” I recall one time when getting dinner with a friend and a friend of the administration, that “you can either win the argument or get something passed.” I think about that debate often even on the small molehills I make mountains out of working in local government, in part because so many of us are conservative about what we know the most of and we want to make sure our immediate vicinity doesn’t go to hell in a handbasket by the hands of those outside our purview of accountability. However rough it may be, it is certainly better to be trying to play the game than to impotently rage from the outside, but perhaps I’m biased by being a small fish in a small pond of local affairs.

Often times I’m sent up to sit in on a bid meeting for a new project I’m overseeing the administration of, or I’m sent to meet with new city managers and mayors to see what they need and how I can be of assistance. Last week I had such an opportunity, to meet with the city manager and clerk of a relatively small town that’s at the northernmost edge of our jurisdiction. A two drive still had myself there early, giving me the time to drive around and to check the place out. Certainly some work had to be done, some houses needed either renovation or condemnation, some of the roads were in need of repair, if anything due to water damage underneath. As I parked my car and walked around the small downtown area, which still felt like (and probably still had buildings from) the days of what we envision as the Wild West. A bit silly, walking around and scoping the place out to see what kind of infrastructure exists in the town limits, as I’m dressed with a jacket and tie and the rest, with a small revolver as one of my everyday carry weapons.

With half an hour to spare, I found myself walking to the center square where events and festivals are hosted. At the center was probably the most decorated and well maintained place in the entire downtown area, a memorial for those who had gone off to war for over the last 150 years. It was impressive, several gray granite pillars stood, carved with the names of those who had fought in America’s war between the states, both for the Union and the Confederacy, the Spanish American War, World War One, Two, Korea, Vietnam, and up to today. I saw several surnames that were there from the beginning, only to make it to World War Two or Vietnam and then no more of that family name for any conflict after. The imagination ran wild, perhaps the family name died in combat? Or perhaps they came home only to have daughters, or told their sons that it wasn’t worth taking up arms in the next war?

Americans have a very familial military tradition, as did many other places with their own aristocracy. There are whole family names and lineages (my own included) that have served in every War that America has called her sons to fight in and did so willingly, regardless of the popularity of that specific war. My Father’s side of the family, Scottish immigrants who came to settle in Ohio at the turn of the 19th century in 1810, has a family cemetery in where most of my kin is buried. My mother’s side, being here since the 1680s, hasn’t had the same military tradition, if anything has been up until recently farmers. I haven’t had the chance to visit the cemetery often, in part due to my father’s own military career keeping me from knowing much about my own extended family, with each reunion being “reintroductions” of people I may have met when I was five or seven years old, only now meeting them at twenty-nine years old.

It gave me pause, reading name after name after name of a town that had a population just at an even three thousand people. They had given their sons, brothers, and fathers to serve in a cold beyond of hell and deployments because their nation had asked them to. The subject of the military is always a sensitive one to me, knowing that in that family plot my last name has been in every conflict since the Mexican-American War. That tradition most assuredly dies with my father’s children, whether due to me being 4F, and my parents insisting we study and go to school and become something other than a soldier, even if it was my dream growing up as a child. Alas, we have to put these childish dreams aside and wake up and smell the burning coffee. I’m engaged in a much calmer albeit annoying form of public service, but it’s always easier to idealize from the outside looking in.

In every one of these towns you’ll find memorials like this, and in the South, if you were lucky to avoid the hell that was the 2016-2020 push for statues to be burned and taken down you’ll see ones for the Confederacy if you know where to look. Pieces of history, memorials to men who simply did their duty for God and Country, still standing as epitaphs of men better than ourselves and who were willing to do what most of us would find impossible. That romantic idealism of a nation, of a people, a place, it is still here in small town America. They’ve been hollowed out from the inside, walking down a different town on the same day were publicly available free-to-use naloxone in case of a suspected overdose. There are few decent jobs that aren’t with large chains/franchises, and the trades are entirely dependent on where the industry actually is. As one of the few people in the recurring online spat of the urban-rural divide in America actually living rurally, it’s not as idyllic as any WFH tech worker with a micro-farm will tell you. I know people who farm and homestead, they work their asses off just to make due, break even, and keep everything clean and healthy.

But these people, those who still kept their Trump hats on and flew the American flag in the midst of terrible times, trying to make due in worst of economic hardships, who still call upon the name of the Lord and cast their burdens on him for they know He shall sustain them, will go above and beyond to give their sons and their fathers to the national cause if it were asked. Those names on those pillars, those names from the decades and centuries past, are the Americans who gave their all, “to ourselves and our Posterity.”

May their efforts, may their sacrifices never be in vain.