Much of the story of contemporary rural life is given in this photograph of an area near Winchester, TN. The house is new, the road is paved, the wheat field is neatly trimmed, a powerline passes overhead. Twenty years ago, this was an area entirely of farms. Several related things happened to transform the farms into suburban landscape. The initial transformation was the building of a "by-pass" to allow a quicker route from Cowan to Decherd; the by-pass bisected some of the best farmland contiguous to the city of Winchester. The house in this photograph is on the edge of a quality housing development built along the by-pass. The by-pass was followed by the development of an industrial park, the expansion of the nearby municipal airport, and the building of a new, less expensive sub-division along the road in the right corner of the photo. Most recently, a new industrial service highway or Interstate connector road has been constructed alongside the airport, and Nissan corporation is nearing completion of a major assembly plant along this road.

In 1970, a circle of a half mile radius centered upon this house would have included only farms and would have contained perhaps a dozen farmhouses. Today that circle includes more than a hundred houses along with a trailer park and the industrial park. Many of the grain fields are now in housing sub-divisions. Crops are still grown around this house: the wheat shown, fifty acres of corn further up the road, another large wheat field about a half mile away. But now the land is divided again and again by new roads and streets and the character of the land has changed from farm to suburb. Riding lawn mowers keep both the yard neat and the wheat field in order. Most of the people who live nearby do not farm and are not related to the few farmers left here. The pressure upon this wheat field and the remaining agricultural lands is inexorable: in time, less than a decade now, these fields will become yards and the suburbanization of the landscape will be complete.

Across much of America, rural life has become recessive: it is retreating before the hop-scotch, checker board pressures of rustic suburbanity and urban expansion. Farms are rendered as sub-divisions, old barns stand abandoned and vine-covered in the shadow of assembly plants, country stores stand closed at the crossroads and corners of the rural roads, tractors rust behind collapsing sheds, the country churches are shuttered or advertise in the paper for people to attend. The rough edges of the hedgerows are trimmed and the thickets are cleared away. The smell of cows and swine is pushed away or banned by ordinance. Water lines, fire hydrants, and taxes march down the roads. The farms themselves are the last harvest of the rural land: picked and bought and consumed by the town. Although some of this process can occasionally be slowed or amended, for the most part the dynamic of rural transformation is now self-sustaining across America. The ultimate destruction, however, is not that of the land, nor even of the way of life that swayed here for two centuries, but the loss of this life to memory. The most certain death of these rural ways would be for a new people to emerge who have no need to imagine that life here was ever any different from the suburb they enjoy. At the Center for Rural Life our purpose is to bear witness, to record and testify, lest these things pass away in silence.

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