'A dying community:' What a Wisconsin beer town shows about saving rural America | Opinion

POTOSI, Wisconsin − It looked like a bomb had gone off in the brewery.

In the days after it closed, people ransacked the building, taking whatever they could carry, perhaps as mementos or items to sell, all signs of the bitter loss in 1972 as Potosi fell into a long economic winter. Over time, the building’s brick walls crumbled and rubble littered the ground.

This wasn’t just the loss of one company in a small town tucked into the soaring bluffs of Wisconsin’s Driftless region near the Mississippi River, but potentially a final deathblow. Local farms had been disappearing for decades; now major industrial employers were, too. People followed the exit ramps, especially young people and with them the community volunteers, taxpayers, families with children to fill classrooms and new ideas to help reverse the decline. A future, vanishing before its eyes. “What would happen?” former Village President Frank Fiorenza recalled wondering. “We did not want this to be a dying community.”

Once boasting a population of 5,000 as a mining and farming town in the 1800s, the community shrank over the decades to just a few hundred. Mic Walsh remembers losing the brewery, and a string of machinery dealers around the same time as the local farming community struggled. The owner of a local Ace Hardware watched his customer base shrink, and the pain spread through the community. The local drugstore closed. The town’s two barber shops, and more.

“It all just multiplies,” Walsh said. “It’s hard to see.”

Across America, there are scores of places just like Potosi that have collapsed as the economy shifted from rural to urban. After the most recent U.S. Census in 2020, America’s population was only 14 percent rural, the lowest on record and a steep drop from 57 percent in 1940, according to research by University of New Hampshire rural demographer Kenneth Johnson.

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While that shift might seem unstoppable, there are times when the flow reversed. One was during a global economic crisis when jobless people retreated from cities to the shelter of family farms during the Great Depression. Another was a global pandemic, where they fled from crowded offices amid COVID-19 to remote work in sparsely populated places far from the city. In just the past two years, two-thirds of Wisconsin counties gained population, far away from fast growing places like Dane County.

In a post-COVID world with many companies returning workers to offices and cities looking to revive deserted downtowns, rural America stands at a crucial crossroads. It’s a juncture that’s personal for me, because I’m part of the problem: a farm boy who moved away, yet still searching, struggling, hoping to be part of the solution. I found some answers in Potosi, a place showing how a unique identity, volunteerism and entrepreneurial spirit can serve as a road map to resurrect rural America.

A reprieve as Wisconsin ghost towns literally fall off the map

The depth and the breadth of the problem—declining rural populations and the loss of economic activity, potential, and hope that goes with it—is staggering.

Johnson, the demographer, said for decades most of the rural decline was driven by rural areas not growing as fast as urban ones, until 2010 to 2020 when the size of the rural population actually shrank. The problem deepens when a community not only has more people leaving than coming, but more people dying than being born.

That’s a crucial problem wherever you live. Rural communities that supply our food, our natural resources, an affordable workforce, and more are vital to our country’s economy. And their decline fuels other problems, like our rural-urban divide and national drug crisis.

Rural states like Wisconsin are no stranger to communities struggling, off on their own. But can they actually disappear?

Yes, historians say. Try finding Gratiot’s Grove, a mining town now gone but immortalized in the book “Ghost Towns of Wisconsin” by William Stark.

“Some of them simply disappeared, they were no more,” said Jerry Apps, the Wisconsin author and historian who has a new book, “On Farms and Rural Communities,” coming out this spring. “Many of them struggled to exist.”

A few numbers illustrate the breadth of the economic upheaval fueling hard times in Wisconsin, from farming to paper mills to manufacturing:

• 135,000: Farms Wisconsin has lost since the high point in 1935, a more than 67 percent decline, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture data.

• 8,200: Jobs lost in the wood and paper industries – including Wisconsin’s storied paper mills – in just one decade from 2006 to 2016, according to state data. Small cities like Wisconsin Rapids have struggled in the wake of the closure of their mills, such as when Verso shut down in 2020.

• 3,200: Jobs lost at Janesville’s GM plant and associated suppliers after the plant closed in December of 2008, according to reporting by the Janesville Gazette at the time.

Yet even in hard hit industries, there are hopeful signs. Wisconsin is still consistently No. 1 in cheese and cranberry production, with many jobs and communities tied to agriculture. Partial recovery and retooling has contributed toward a demand for paper industry workers in recent years. Though And although the GM the closure affected the city and rural areas, Janesville has worked to diversify its economy.

Many rural communities are also turning toward tourism and working to find a unique identity to continue luring people back to places once dismissed as dying ghost towns. The ongoing resilience of rural areas and small communities, through decades of change, mean rural Wisconsin isn’t even close to done, Apps said.

“The revolution in rural America is not complete,” he said.

'Music City' allure led to a difficult conversation with dad

I don’t remember the first time I thought about leaving home, but I remember the first time I said it out loud.

It was 2008 on Broadway Avenue, Nashville’s famous thoroughfare known for country music streaming from bars up one end and down the other. We were on a rare family vacation visiting Tennessee’s Music City. I was standing under the neon lights, a few too many drinks singing in my head as the honky tonk music poured onto the sidewalk, when my dad walked out and saw me.

“I’m gonna live here someday,” I said.

There was an immediate distance in that moment, though we were standing right next each other.

I had grown up on our family farm always feeling I was falling short — loving our way of life but having less talent for cattle and tractors than my dad. My dad had grown up on the farm too, and knew nothing else. He supported my decisions, but part of him always seemed like he was wishing I’d followed in his footsteps. I discovered writing and it took me to college, and newsrooms around Wisconsin where I finally felt like I had something to offer.

To me, Nashville not only meant economic opportunity, a place for a serious journalist in a big city, but somewhere a farm boy could be proud to live; the home of country music. To my dad it was simply a loud place over 600 miles away. I remember the hurt in his face, like a crack in a whiskey glass.

It was a small, personal, difficult moment that shows what rural communities across Wisconsin are up against. Maybe nowhere could have dulled the allure of Nashville. But more types of economic opportunity might have increased the chances for me and countless other rural kids to fight the lure of opportunity elsewhere, especially when it seems to be fading at home.

Creativity, community involvement, and COVID: The path back

Potosi refused to become another abandoned ghost town. It took many people to turn the tide. Like Fiorenza refusing to be what he called a “caretaker” as village president in the 1990s; local businessman Gary David buying the crumbling brewery building because he and others saw the unique asset of its history; and the efforts of countless volunteers like Walsh, Larry Kalina and his wife, and others.

Ultimately, the community raised millions, including $2.4 million from individual donors, re-establishing the Potosi Brewing Co. under what is now the nonprofit Potosi Foundation. In what had once been a vacant building in a dying town was now a unique spot for locals and tourist alike. The old brewery became a tap house and restaurant in 2008, in the style of an old beer hall – a finely carved wooden bar curving across the main wall, a long row of wooden Potosi-brand beer taps behind it. It can still brew beer and there’s a museum upstairs, but far more is being made in the larger modern facility built nearby.

Along with the jobs, and the attraction of some 70,000 tourists each year, came economic activity to support other businesses. Across the street from the brewery today is a woodworking shop, with a special event space and cabin builder nearby.

It’s that unique character I wanted when I finally came back.

After five years in Nashville, and then Washington, D.C. as my journalism career transitioned into the public policy arena, I came home. The birth of my second nephew sparked it, but all the reasons had always been there: family, outdoors, local places I was relieved were still there. Roots.

Eventually, I helped build a consulting business in Madison, and spent weekends on the farm. I took time with my sister and her kids, my parents, and childhood friends. I helped my dad and sister on the farm when I was able, finding I could still drive a tractor passably. My dad and I cleared land for a cabin on some acres I have next to our family farm, and I settled into a restless peace as someone who went elsewhere, but didn’t have to stay gone.

COVID put this dynamic on overdrive. While there was little good about the pandemic or subsequent economic crisis, one thing it showed is how much can be done from different places. More urban workers can live in the country, or a small town. And more rural workers can join the remote workforce, in addition to traditional jobs at farms, factories, and construction sites.

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That positions places like Potosi better than ever. With the brewery humming, the town becoming a destination spot, and new small businesses coming in, Potosi is as ready as any community to benefit from the new mobility of the American population.

Retired now, many of the people who helped revitalize Potosi are still volunteering, and providing an example to young people to get involved. Walsh the former hardware store owner volunteers as a groundskeeper and handyman at the brewery, while Fiorenza the former village president and the Kalinas continue to help with the community’s next projects, like resurrecting the downtown.

Larry Kalina, who joined a committee guiding Potosi’s ongoing revitalization efforts, raised four kids with his wife, all of them educators. He’s proud of all his kids, and grateful to have them all about two hours away. But he’s also experienced what it’s like to have them travel far for job opportunities, and knows Potosi has to give residents new ways to make a living, and visitors a real reason to stop.

“The key is if you can get people excited about something,” he said.

My own situation evolved again, as my wife and I moved to California when she got a job that allowed us to be near her family. But we didn’t walk away from what I’d regained. With my work allowing me to be anywhere, but benefiting from frequent trips back, I have split my time between our small town in northern California and the Wisconsin countryside—living on the family farm when I’m back, for the first time since I was 18. I help on the business side of our farm, and tend to spend my time and money in rural places, or at local businesses over chains when I can.

As I’ve walked the line between the urban economy constantly pulling me away, and the rural economy I’ve rediscovered, I can’t help but think places like Potosi offer a roadmap. And if times of crisis are among the reasons people return to rural areas, it’s proof of something they need. We definitely have two economies in this country, but that doesn’t mean places like Potosi have to take the scraps. Maybe more people can continue to come back, or straddle our two economies more often to bring them together.

“How do you survive?” Fiorenza said, sitting in the beer hall old and new, all at once. “You adapt.”

Brian Reisinger is a writer who grew up on a family farm in Sauk County who has written for a wide range of publications and tells the hidden stories of rural America, including the drug crisis, past and future of Wisconsin farmers and adventures in the outdoors. Reisinger works in public affairs consulting for Wisconsin-based Platform Communications. He studied journalism and political science at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and has won awards from the National Society of Newspaper Columnists, Seven Hills Review literary magazine, Wisconsin Newspaper Association, and more.

This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Rural areas in Wisconsin have new lease on life in post-Covid America