In 1868, the railroad bypassed Forestville, MN and the town died. The decline came slowly and over time my distant relatives, Thomas and Mary Meighen, saw the town dwindle, people move away, and they were left in an empty town with their farm and a general store attached to their home. Farm workers, paid in ‘chits’ to spend in that store, kept it open until 1908 when business in it came to a screeching halt as Thomas abruptly closed up shop — the last business in Forestville — with all the merchandise inside.

My Dad and his cousins tell stories of being kids on weekend holiday in the 1930’s, taken out to the farm to look around and rubbing the store windows so they could peek inside at all the old clothing, canned goods and assorted sundries, all left intact when Thomas locked the store and he and Mary moved to nearby Preston. Many of our other relatives moved there since Preston thrived when the railroad was built and passed through it instead of smaller Forestville to the south.

The Minnesota Historical Society later purchased their property (and what was left of the town) and turned it into a State Park, complete with interpretive storytellers in period costumes. It’s definitely worth a summer visit some weekend.

The lesson here is how important transportation was for physical goods in the late 1800’s during a time of shifting from a predominantly agrarian economy to one that was primarily industrial. The location of a railroad line dictated the fate of a town (though post-Civil War economic doldrums didn’t help). You may remember (or have heard stories about) how imperative it was for businesses to be “located on a siding” so railroad cars could load and unload easily, but what’s less obvious is the economic explosion that always accompanied the laying of track and the development which occurred alongside it, and how being bypassed by the railroad could doom a town or region.

If you buy in to the premise that we’re living in a time of the greatest shift in communication and connection in history driven by the internet — and that the transport of digital bits is as important (if not more so) than the movement of physical goods over the past 100 years or so — it almost goes without saying that location is not only less important today, in many ways it’s irrelevant unless you don’t have access to the internet and fast access at that.

What happens to your town if it’s bypassed by high-speed broadband like Forestville was by the railroad in 1868?

…  [Read More…]