Need For Little Places Disappeared

     Tightwad, MO. -- The Tightwad Max Logan knew as a child had three country stores. There was a sawmill and a barbershop. He walked to the one-room school.
     Today, that place lives on only in the 73-year-old man's memories. The old buildings are gone now, and so are all but 50 of its inhabitants.
     The town center -- a bank, a volunteer fire department, a defunct gas station, a barbecue joint and a dress store closed more days than open -- hardly looks like a center at all. The town's children are bused to schools miles away.
     This, increasingly, is the story of small-town USA.
     From Mark Twain's fictionalized account of his Hannibal, MO, boyhood to Northern Exposure's Cicely, Alaska, generations have cherished the images of small town where life is good, people are nice and nothing, it seems ever changes.
     But the myth of small-town American has endured far better than the small towns themselves.
     Today in the USA, just over 1 in 10 lives in a city with fewer than 10,000 residents -- the lowest percentage in at least 100 years, the 1990 Census found.
     And despite the lore surrounding them and often-heroic local efforts to save them, many small towns are disappearing. The smaller the town, the greater the risk: The population of cities with fewer than 100 residents tumbled nearly 30% in the last decade alone.
     Even slightly bigger towns are in trouble: Places with 100 to 999 resident lost nearly 5%.
     "The extent to which small places have declined in the 1980s is unprecedented," says Agriculture Department demographer Calvin Beale. "It's very common to have more people buried in the cemetery than live in town.
     "The need for little places like Tightwad disappeared."
     In their place has come inexorable urbanization that has transformed the USA from a nation of small farming towns to one of big and bigger cities. The proportion of urban dwellers has risen from 40% at the turn of the century to 57% in 1940 to 75% today.
     Nowhere are these changes more evident than in the midwest, where states traditionally allowed even the smallest communities to incorporate.
     Missouri is the kind of tiny towns. It boasts 115 cities, towns and hamlets with fewer than 100 residents and the charge -- at least on paper -- of governing themselves.
     Runner-up is North Dakota with 114 tiny cities, followed by Iowa with 92, Nebraska with 87 and Kansas with 79.
     These days, the "Show-Me" state is so crowded with tiny towns that they face the ultimate threat: vanishing from the official highway map.
     "We're going to computerized mapping next year, and a lot of these little burgs will probably be coming of the map," says Missouri highway department mapping supervisor Kieth Hassler.
     It will be a high-tech demise that began with the railroads and grew with the inventions of the tractor and the Model T, which wiped out the need for small commercial centers as surely as if Ford had driven though their storefronts.
     "There used to be a little country store every five miles, " Logan says of Tightwad. What happened, he says was simple: "Then you had horses. Now you have cars."
     And suburbanization. Says University of Wisconsin sociologist Glenn Fuguitt: "With people increasingly going to... Wal-Marts and other stores on the periphery of towns, what's the advantage of being right inside a little place?"
     In an attempt to stay afloat, small-town business people often wear as many hats as they have to, offering all-service stores where customers can buy groceries, gas, a hair cut, sometimes even a tombstone.
     That pretty much describes Tom Skaggs, a Tightwad alderman, volunteer fireman, insurance agent, owner of Tightwad Tom's boat storage and tireless promoter of the village.
     Skaggs spearheaded a successful effort in incorporate Tightwad in 1984 in hopes the tiny town would be able to capitalize on its unique name and location near Ozarks.
     But even with occasional tourists stopping to open up a checking account -- the Tightwad Branch of the United Missouri Bank prints checks with the words, "Tightwad Bank," and a cash-clutching fist -- efforts to resuscitate Tightwad have reaped little more than occasional good publicity.
     While Skaggs dreams of a Tightwad family theme park, the village's population has fallen from 56 in 1984 to 50 today.
     Still, Tightwad probably has better odds of surviving than many other tiny towns, which are near neither major highways nor resort areas.
     Take Elmira, MO. This once-thriving coal-mining town lies within the Kansas City metro area, just an hour's drive from the skyscrapers. But while that enable Elmirans to commute to work in North Kansas City factories, it doesn't make outsiders any more likely to notice the town, perched at the dead end of a country road.
     In Elmira's heyday, from 1919 to 1949, the Elmira Coal Co. operated a local mine, and several hundred miners and their families lived in the town which boasted its own baseball team and a tavern called the Red Onion.
     But Elmira's population has been tumbling -- from 124 in 1970, to 109 in 1980, to 70 in 1990 -- since the railroads converted from coal to diesel, forcing the mine out of business.
     Now, living residents are outnumbered by the dead -- 501 former Elmirans rest in a tidy hillside cemetery.
     Elmira's population dip below 100 cost the village the last of the few hundred tax dollars it had received from the state and its "services" are almost nonexistent: "The city provides a trash bin.
     Not that residents have to pay a lot.
     City Clerk Evelyn Parker faithfully sends out annual tax bills, but she doesn't worry about collection. Four Elmira property owners owe less than the 29¢ it costs to mail out the bill. Another 10 owe less than 58¢ -- the cost of mailing the bill plus a receipt for payment.
     "There's nothing here," says city alderman Mike Owens, whose family attends church in what was once the miners' union hall. "A lot of history."
     That sense -- that small towns matter because of what they were and what they symbolize -- has been kept alive in the nation's collective consciousness, even as the towns themselves have died.
     Small towns are an "anachronism," says the University of Wisconsin's Fuguitt. But their support "illustrates the importance of this image. It's a little like motherhood."
     But the image of a small town often bears little resemblance to the reality.
     Peek into life in Florida, Missouri's tiniest town and the birthplace of Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain.
     At it's zenith, the village claimed about 100 residents. Today, there are two -- if you believe the Census Bureau -- three according to Floyd Rouse, 62, who lives there with his 85-year-old mother, Alice.
     When the weather is nice and Rouse goes outside to mow the lawn, he often sees a woman leave one of the town's dozen mostly deserted homes and walk up and down Florida's mostly deserted main street.
     He's never met her.
     "I guess I should have talked to her," Rouse Says, "but I didn't."