I live in a small Northeastern American town, a lonely, lovely place so full of unusual characters and strange stories that I have often thought it amply deserving of a curious little book. But then, Sherwood Anderson wrote Winesburg, Ohio in 1919, in which he told tales from a similarly hidden little town in the Midwest, weaving them together into the rude fabric of a novel that has remained a classic of modern American literature ever since. In other words, the job has already been done.
Nevertheless, I fancied that it might be possible to try to write his book again. It might be done as a centennial experiment, to come out in 2019—only this time it would be set in my village of Sandisfield, Massachusetts, with a new cast and a new set of happenings and memories. Like Winesburg, to protect reputations and allow for some literary license, the place could be given a new name. I toyed with the idea—filching from Edith Wharton’s Ethan Frome—of calling it Starkfield, Massachusetts. Under that title, a book telling of life in a forgotten corner of America in the twenty-first century might become a classic work of fiction, too, to be read in the schools and living rooms of the twenty-second. It was a fancy, little more, but one that long lingered in my mind.
Instead, for a reason that has much to do with the underlying theme of this book, something quite different happened. A group of us, mostly admirers of Sherwood Anderson and all of us quite aware of the uniquely interesting nature of our own little town and its people, started a local monthly newspaper. The Sandisfield Times published its first issue in April 2010, and in the years since it has become, to the surprise of all, an essential part of village life, required reading for everyone—like the Winesburg Eagle, in fact, but a century later.
The paper is now popular, needed, and ceaselessly written to, and it has brought to Sandisfield something that the village has never truly enjoyed in all of its 250 years of incorporated existence: a sense of community, a common sense of unity.
There were reasons why it had taken so long. Geography was one: the rivers that flowed down from the Berkshire hills and through the town had long separated the tiny clusters of houses, kept people firmly apart from one another. “This is a town where you’ll never be bothered if you don’t want to be,” someone said when I first moved here in 2001. Some days not a single car comes down our dirt road. The quiet can be deafening, though magical for being so. There is just the breeze and the birdsong and on a winter’s day like this one, the cracking of the ice, and at night the screaming and yapping of the local coyotes. This is a fine place for those who value solitude.
Then again, New Englanders can be a taciturn breed, stern with newcomers. The old Puritan families, remainders of the first settlers, keep their own counsel. But this is America, and these first settlers have since been augmented by outsiders who journeyed here from just about everywhere. There are Finns and Magyars here in abundance, and Ukrainians, a handful of Scots and a Cornishman, a lady from Haiti, a Latvian, a family of newly arrived Albanians from Kosovo. The town constable’s family is from Spain. Once there were enough Russian Jews here—many bent on raising chickens for the grocers of New York City—to warrant turning the old Baptist church into a synagogue. But then the Jews went down to the city, leaving the chicken farms behind. The temple that they left then became the village arts center, where a small group of enthusiasts produces plays for each other and puts on thinly attended concerts. And for years the people of Sandisfield, different, disparate, diffident, kept resolutely to themselves like this: America in ethnic microcosm, though in this corner of the country, an America somewhat disinclined to pull together as one.
But now, with the newspaper, much has changed. The forum that its pages offer is now abuzz with news, argument, and conversation. The annual town meeting, by which most New England villages govern themselves and which here used to be a sorry affair attended by almost no one, is now for the first time crowded with voters, loud with debate. The arts center staged a play about the history of the village in 2012, and for the first time in its ten-year existence, found it had to turn people away for want of room.
Neighborliness has now become commonplace, replacing distance and isolation. I write this two days after a historic snowstorm; all I can see from my study window is a blanket of pure white, the old stone walls quite submerged by drifts, the apple trees in the orchard shuddering under the blasts of wind. The early records of this town referred to it as a “howling wilderness,” and on a day like this, with my windows rattling and the birds being knocked sideways in the sky, it is. Yet people still come by—some on cross-country skis, some on snowshoes—to make sure all is well; and we go out, too, knocking on doors, making certain those without power have firewood and hot soup and toddy. Everyone now has a camera, and after an event like this, the telephone rings constantly with offers of images for the coming month’s newspaper. Now that there is a paper, people want to employ it to be able to remember where they were, to remind themselves what it was like, when the Great Storm of 2013 struck Sandisfield, our town. (And yes: Thornton Wilder’s play of that name was due to be staged here later in the year—another mark of the coming change, of the growth of community.)
Whether this change is all a consequence of the new existence of the Sandisfield Times, I cannot entirely say, though I suspect it to be so and wish it. For if it is, then it underlines and confirms one of the themes of the previous pages, that the creation of any sense of unity among a population of potentially disharmonious settlers almost always requires the deliberate agency of man. Community is seldom an organic thing, especially among migrants. It needs to be nurtured, facilitated, encouraged.
In Sandisfield, a town now 250 years old, it rarely was. For most of the town’s existence, such constructive agency was minimal. There was the decision to tar some of the dirt roads in the 1920s, which helped. There was the coming of the telephone in the 1930s, which only a few could initially afford. Otherwise, very little. The railroad long since passed Sandisfield by. The stagecoach was infrequent. The local inns had fallen into disrepair. The store was moribund. There was little attempt ever made to bring the townspeople together—until 2010, when the newspaper arrived. Then, almost overnight, an untapped vein of mutual feeling and goodwill was tapped. The town changed, its people becoming suddenly welded into one, turned to a single purpose with a new, united identity.
Far, far from this corner of the Berkshires, out in the great wilderness of the old American continent, there was once almost no sense of community either—until the immigrants came. There was little sense of oneness when America was peopled only by its original people. Native Americans were spread too far apart and were by geography just as isolated, though on a far larger scale, as were our villagers of today, huddled alone in their deep river valleys. And so there was little sense among the Shawnee, for instance, that they were bound in any way to the Iroquois or the Miami, little sense of brotherhood between the Comanche and the Sioux, or between the Blackfeet and the Crow. Common ancestry of the Indian people alone, the presence of common genes, was simply not sufficient to bind most of them together. Most ran their own fiefdoms, sheltered behind their palisades, warred with one another, formed uneasy alliances, never imagined the concept of continental nationhood.
But then came the migrants, then came the nation, and then with it came the gathering notion that unity was, for so complex an entity, a matter of manifest need and desire. And so the annealing began. It began even though the migrant settlers could be every bit as foreign to one another as had been the Indians, with an immigrant from Finland, say, being in genetic and cultural fact very much more different from a Sicilian, say, than ever was a Cheyenne from a Hopi or a Cree.
But as we know, this all changed. The United States was born and was slowly suffered into existence. What eventually set this new America apart from original America is that, through all of the republic’s years, there existed agencies that were deliberately bent to the task of creating community, creating the practical means for the forging of alliances for the common good of all.
The agencies were large government bodies of power and influence that could design and build vast systems of roads, bring electricity to isolated farms, sponsor exploring expeditions involving thousands of scientists, and order into the unknown men like Lewis and Clark and demand that they ascertain the shape and nature of the nation.
Some of the agencies were individuals, men with great vision, men like George Washington, Theodore Judah, Isham Randolph, Samuel Morse, and Thomas MacDonald, whose ideas and inventions, driven by the prospect of personal fortune, in most cases, similarly helped bind ever more tightly the peoples of the country together.
Some of the agencies of man were small. Maybe they were groups or individuals who persuaded the unwilling or the recalcitrant, just as we did in our half-forgotten village in the hills, of the benefits of common purpose. Our newspaper has volunteers today whose ethnic origins are Italian, Greek, Scots, Irish, Japanese, Dutch, and Chinese. But all, in a uniquely American manner, see virtue and power in the new harmony that they have made, which manifests itself in the modest document that all can see and read on the first day of each month.
This new sense of harmony may have been a long time coming to Sandisfield, Massachusetts, and there are other communities within the country that are more isolated and forgotten than ours, where disunity is more likely to be the watchword. Yet it cannot and should not be forgotten that the story of the United States of America is still a developing one, a continuing evolution, and that the union becomes ever stronger as a result of the pressures of steady change. After all, the very notion of change informs the Preamble to the United States Constitution: “We the people . . . in order to form a more perfect union . . .”
The union, it was recognized back in the late eighteenth century, has to be made ever more perfect all the time. Our small-town newspaper is just one more step on the way. This is how it is done—our way, the American way.