The Destruction of a Southern Town for Expediency and “Progress”

When my wife and I moved to the South in 2002, we ended up in a small, semirural town in North Louisiana. It was the kind of small town we wanted. Our intent was to avoid cities as much as possible. We had both grown up in small towns in the North and were not city people. The town we ended up in had one main street and about five side streets, and it had a distinct small town Southern atmosphere. There was a gas station, a couple of churches, a bank, market, a few restaurants, and a hardware store on the main street.

One of the restaurants was sort of a local hangout, the kind of place you could visit on a warm afternoon, buy a glass of sweet tea or Coke, and just sit and visit with some of the local folks. They also served a pretty good (and inexpensive) fried catfish dinner in the evening. My wife and I often stopped there for supper on Saturday evening. It was all ideal – for a while.

But then came the scions of “progress and change,” and nothing was ever the same again. They told us the town needed a bigger and better bridge across the river – and they were correct about that. The old bridge across the river that was there had been built in the early 1930s. It needed replacing. But the replacement we ended up with took out about a third of the town’s main street. The result was that one of the churches, the hardware store, and the two restaurants all had to go. And the local chemical company (a division of Dow Chemicals) bought from the town all the land that the church and restaurants and hardware store had previously occupied, and nothing was to be built on that land. The chemical company wanted all of it to remain open space. That pretty well killed the town’s main street as far as business went and it erased the unique Southern atmosphere the town had previously had.

The mayor at that time had some grandiose plans to put all the businesses out on the main highway – about five miles from where they had previously been. I’m not sure anyone ever figured out completely what he was trying to do, but he worked at it anyway – and the town completely lost its unique Southern character and became just one more shopping stop on the main highway. There were those in town that protested, but not enough of them.

My wife and I now no longer live in the town, in the house we lived in. Our health will not permit that any longer. When we still lived in that town, I ran for the town council one year, on a platform of less government and more personal responsibility. And though I didn’t win, I got a respectable number of votes for someone who had not lived their life there.

The mayor, with all the big plans, extended the town’s debt so much that the town almost ended up bankrupt. The mayor after him was a conservative and loyal American who had served in the Marines, but by the time he got elected, the town was so far in debt there was little he could do. I understand the current mayor is quite liberal, so we can kiss the unique Southern atmosphere of the town goodbye. It’s doubtful if it will ever return. It reminded me of the West Texas towns in some of Elmer Kelton’s novels about Texas. They were on the point of losing their unique Western identity because of what some “progressive” people wanted to do to and with them. Unfortunately, such situations are not unique to fiction. They exist in real life, and we have seen them acted out.

Right now, the South and its culture and identity are under constant attack. Southern monuments, symbols, and flags are almost everywhere denigrated where once they were honored and revered. If the South loses its identity, it will never get it back and it will end up being just another nonentity among the other nonentities in Wokedom. That seems to be where we are headed. I have talked with other Southern patriots who said they never thought they’d live to see what’s going on now, and I did not think I would, either, but I have – and it gives me no pleasure. I could weep for my adopted country!

All that has made her unique is being flushed down the sewer in a headlong rush to be like the rest of the country – something we should not want nor want to be partakers in. Both the South and the Far West have a unique heritage – something that should be preserved, not tossed aside. They are the only unique American cultures remaining and they must be preserved. We discard them to our own hurt and the hurt of our children!

-By Al Benson, Jr.