Newcomers to Old Towns: Suburbanization of the Heartland

Although the death of the small town has been predicted for decades, during the 1990s the population of rural America actually increased by more than three million people. In this book, Sonya Salamon considers these rural newcomers and the impact they have on the social relationships, public spaces, and community resources of small-town America.

Through detailed ethnographic studies of six small towns in central Illinois, Salamon explains how these population changes often cause a suburbanization that erodes the close-knit small-town community, with especially severe consequences for small town youth. To successfully combat the homogenization of the heartland, Salamon argues, newcomers must work with the original residents to together sustain the vital aspects of community life and identity that first drew them to small towns.

An illustration of the rising significance of the small town, Salamon’s work, of interest to social scientists, sociologists, policymakers, and urban planners, is an important contribution to the ongoing discussion of social capital and the study of the transformation and definition of communities.

"Salamon has written an engaging story that puts a human face on the macro-level shifts affecting the once agrarian rural communities of the American Midwest. Through her stories of six Central Illinois ’postagrarian’ towns, she deftly illuminates much of the micro-foundation of these shifts in the daily decisions of people."—Ralph B. Brown, Rural History