Small Towns

Picture of Bellefonte, Pennsylvania.(www.familyoldphotos.com)

I really enjoyed Peirce Lewis piece on Small Town in Pennsylvania. I can really relate to this article because I have grown up in a small town my whole life in Alaska. Where I lived we also depend on the resources that the area gave us. Without fishing or oil my town would disappear. We truly survive on tourist for the fishing and oil for jobs, even though our resources haven’t ran out yet, it is only a matter of time we soon hit an economic crisis like Bellefonte did. I really understand Lewis’s view on small towns. Growing up in a small town makes you appreciate how a region or society needs to work together to make it. Also I think Peirce Lewis is right about the precipitation of small towns, which is that they have played a crucial role in making America the way it is today with economics, the physical environment, history, and technology. My favorite part of this piece was when Lewis was talking about when small towns usually have no plan what so even in planning a city out. He says “There were no geographic rule-books to tell the planners where to place their town or lay out their street; then as now they simply used the conventional wisdom of the day” (Lewis, 334). The issue that bothered me about this article was that I was surprise Lewis wrote about this because even though he lived near the town for fifteen years, he wasn’t born there.