Words by Trudy Haywood Saunders
In the not so distant past, small towns were the lifeblood of the American economy, dotting the landscape with vibrant hubs of small businesses and light industry. People could find pretty much everything along Main Street and good paying jobs, and if you couldn’t find it, you probably didn’t need it. When factory jobs were sent overseas, small towns suffered the brunt of the loss, the South particularly impacted. Storefronts were shuttered, and jobs vanished along with a lot of the people in many communities. But a growing number of renovators, restorers, and designers, fueled by a desire for small town values and a surge in heritage tourism and the ability to work from home, have decided that it’s not the end of the story.
Mike Wolfe
Columbia, Tennessee
“It’s basically storytelling,” Mike Wolfe says. “Each one of these buildings has a story to tell.” Long before he became famous as the star of American Pickers, Wolfe was restoring property in LeClaire, Iowa, eight miles from his hometown. “I didn’t expect the sense of community I felt right away being in a smaller town and learning about its history,” Wolfe says. In those early days, Wolfe became involved with the city council, fire department, and tourism board.
Decades later, Wolfe turned his attention to the town of Columbia, Tennessee, about thirty minutes from where he now lives. “Columbia has great energy,” Wolfe says. “It’s one of those towns that I stepped into that was on the cusp of something.” The first few buildings that he restored were transportation related, an old Texaco gas station from the 40s that was connected to a 1940 Chevy dealership, then an old Esso station from the 1940s that was connected to a 1930s Packard car dealership. Wolfe also has Two Lanes Guesthouse, an Airbnb in downtown Columbia housed in an 1857 building, allowing visitors to stay downtown, walk to a restaurant, coffee shop, small retailer, and experience the small town atmosphere.
People became interested and wanted to be involved.
“These buildings that I restore, I truly don’t look at them as mine. I look at them as the community’s properties,” Wolfe says. “Small town America is how this country was built. If we don’t take care of this stuff in our generation, and we leave it in shambles for the next, what are we truly saying about our history?”
Wolfe credits COVID for accelerating the process of developing many small communities as people left cities and reexamined their lifestyles. “I think a lot of people are longing for, searching for, just wanting to get back to the simpler times and have their lives simpler,” Wolfe says. “Everyone needs a higher power and some spirituality and if that’s directly connected to not only our families, but it reaches to our community, then that’s a beautiful thing.”
Sara McDaniel
Minden, Louisiana
Sara McDaniel began renovating her first house in 1998 and sold things on eBay to fund her home renovations. After a divorce, the former elementary school teacher and assistant principal was living in Corpus Christi, Texas, with no interest in moving home to Louisiana, when her life took an unexpected turn.
“Minden chose me,” the designer and renovator known for Simply Southern Cottage, says about the town dubbed “the friendliest city in the South.” “I was having dinner with customers in Laredo, Texas. When I got in my car to go home I audibly heard the Lord tell me it was time to move home to Louisiana.”
In December 2014 McDaniel came to visit her parents for Christmas, drove around Minden, and saw her house for the first time. It was covered with red tip photinias, the ceiling was caving in, and it was completely rotted. “I firmly believe it was waiting on me.”
The people of Minden welcomed McDaniel, who has since purchased and renovated other properties in Minden, including the Cottage on Fort, and The Villas at Spanish Court, and began her home renovation content creation business. McDaniel now has over twenty-seven doors, including eleven short term rentals on mindenstays.com in the town of just over 13,000 people, and was instrumental in the town being featured on HGTV’s Making Over Minden, a spinoff of HomeTown Kickstart and Magnolia Network’s In With the Old.
“You cannot replicate the hometown feel of these southern small towns,” McDaniel says. ”If we don’t protect and preserve this, that way of life would disappear, so it is crucial that we invest so that these simpler, quiet, slower, peaceful ways of life will be preserved.”
McDaniel’s entire journey since finding her house in 2014 has been built around paralleling the broken parts of her life alongside the broken parts of the properties she restores. “No matter how broken down you think your life is, no matter how broken down you think a property or a home is, it can always be restored.”
McDaniel plans to continue to invest in Minden with her new non-profit Phillip’s Cottage, named in honor of her father. It will be a transition home for women with children coming out of Teen Challenge and is located on the same street as most of her other properties.
Leticia Cline
Cave City, Kentucky
Motorcycle racer and journalist, Leticia Cline, has been all over the world, but found her way back to her hometown of Cave City, Kentucky, to recover from knee surgery in 2019. During the rehab, the former model, and Fortune 500 PR and Marketing Director got bored and started working in her dad’s motorcycle garage, which eventually became Smiley’s Garage, the cultural hub of the town.
“I remember telling my mom, one day I’m going to grow up and I’m going to be rich,” Cline says “I didn’t come back rich, but I came back pretty smart and resourceful.” Seeing the chance to purchase some buildings downtown, Cline renovated the entire block, of which she opened the Dive Bar, and turned the 1903 Ace Theater into a coffee shop with her home upstairs. It didn’t have plumbing, electric, but in its heyday it was the hub of the community.
“I think we’re the last true innovators,” Cline says. “Small towns make do with what they got, and they are creative. I don’t think you find that anywhere else in America.”
“I think people are seeking out authenticity and I think that that is found in a small town so we don’t know any other way to be.”
“You have to keep in perspective that you don’t do these things for you in your lifetime, you do it for the future.”
Cline has been on town council, ran for mayor, is a member of the Business Leaders Development Group, and will be on the ballot for town council again this year. She advocates for not only business entrepreneurs, but building entrepreneurs. “I believe that you can’t have a future without honoring and recognizing your past and there’s no reason why those two things have to be separate.”
“I grew up in a roadside attraction next to the longest cave in the world and the world came to me every day,” Cline says. “I think everyone should be proud of where they’re from and not be embarrassed about being from a small town or living in a small house.”
Cline helped bring in investors who renovated buildings downtown that will have a distillery opening in April, another retail shop, and a yoga studio. “I want to keep going so I don’t have any room left anymore,” Cline says. “Trust the process and be faithful and stay positive. If you stick to the greater good and believe in your mission and doing the right thing, I truly believe that it always works out in the end.”
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Only time will tell how much momentum will spread from these communities, but if optimism, hard word, and faith are the key ingredients, Southern small towns are due for a comeback.
“Younger families are moving into little towns because of the lifestyle they want, the way they want to raise their families, but they’re also being fiscally responsible,” Wolfe says. “You can live in an incredible way in any small town if you have some sort of an online presence for your business. That’s going to be the new thing that’s going to save these towns.”
