Word: towns
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...life all the same. And they have plenty of company. A new kind of "white flight" is going on in America today, but unlike the middle-class exodus from multiethnic cities to the suburbs a generation ago, this middle-class migration is from crowded, predominantly white suburbs to small towns and rural counties. Rural America has enjoyed a net inflow of 2 million Americans this decade--that is, 2 million more people have moved from metropolitan centers to rural areas than have gone the traditional small-town-to-big-city route. (In the 1980s, by contrast, rural areas suffered...
...topiaries they've dreamed about for years. In Wilmington, the emigres include a Boston doctor, a California silicon-chip engineer, a pharmaceutical-research scientist, a cop, a prosecutor, an artist looking for solitude and a carpet installer from suburban Dayton who chucked his job for one selling fertilizer in town...
...shared by tens of millions of Americans. Since the migration is likely to accelerate in coming years, their stories offer a sneak preview of what life may one day be like for others toying with the same idea. To understand how these expectations are playing out in one small town that's climbing the growth curve, TIME looked at dozens of towns with expanding economies and populations ranging from 5,000 to 20,000 (anything smaller is a village, anything bigger a city), then spent several weeks in Wilmington--and discovered that cherished notions of small-town life are colliding...
Founded in 1810 and settled by Quakers who left Virginia and the Carolinas because they opposed slavery, Wilmington remains a farming town, not a tourist mecca or fashionably quaint bedroom community. Corn has always been king here--an hour southwest of Columbus, an hour northeast of Cincinnati, 45 minutes southeast of Dayton--but now the overnight-shipping giant Airborne Express shares the crown. In 1980 Airborne turned a decommissioned Air Force base on the outskirts of town into its national hub, and the sleepy town's fortunes were changed. Before Airborne, the unemployment rate was 9.8%; two-thirds of Wilmington...
That success story landed Wilmington in a 1995 book called The 100 Best Small Towns in America, but as its population has grown from 11,000 in 1990 to more than 13,000 today, the town began getting metropolitan headaches: unplanned development, relentless traffic (36,000 vehicles roll through town every day, 5,000 of them trucks), crime and drugs--even a crack house and a youth-gang problem. Newcomers and old-timers are seeing their visions of small-town life clash, with cultural battles erupting in school-board and city-council meetings. "I moved here because I wanted...