Small Town Conference

Photo by Greg Devereaux Writer Richard Davies explains how his small home town has been boarded up as he speaks at Thursday’s conference.

-By Rae Kruger
Independent Staff Writer

When he was her age, Jennifer Kellen’s father had left the family farm near Lismore. Now, she and her husband Dave Jensen have returned to.

“This is the farm her dad left,” Jensen said. And her father is the one who thinks they are crazy for moving to that farm, Jensen and Kellen said.

“He’s leading the trend for calling us nuts,” Jensen said.

Kellen grew up in Aberdeen, S.D., and Jensen, in a Twin Cities suburb. But small towns and the farm feel like home to them. On Thursday, the couple was comfortable at A Place Called Home, a conference on the midwestern small town, at Southwest Minnesota State University.

They talked some about their desire to leave the sameness of the strip malls and chain restaurants of the suburbs and mid-sized metro areas behind.

“I don’t think it’s a good thing for everyone to move to the city and eat at chain restaurants...,” Kellen said. “We’re losing our identity, our culture, who we are.”
“The TV, the strip malls...a lot of people find comfort in that,” Jensen said.

But not them.

They know they are bucking a national trend. Young people aren’t supposed to want to live in rural small towns let alone on a farm. Small rural towns are aging as young people leave for jobs and lives in metropolitan areas. Businesses close, industries leave, the number of farmers is dwindling.

That’s why Kellen’s family is skeptical of their choice. Her dad, they said, knows what he left and why he left.

And Jensen’s family, well they, they are bit more nostalgic for the rural lifestyle, he said. His parents are several generations removed from the farm.

When they visit the farm the couple has lived on since April, “they say ‘this is great,’” Jensen said.

The struggle between the reasons for leaving and the nostalgia for the past is one a historian can face, said John Miller, a retired history professor who writes about small-town history in South Dakota. He was one of the speakers at Thursday’s event.

In his book “Finding History on Highway 14,” Miller writes about small South Dakota towns on U.S. Highway 14.

Part of what he talked about was the demise of “small-town Saturday nights.”
Growing up as the son of a Missouri Synod Lutheran pastor in small towns in the Midwest, Miller said he’s a small-town boy who never experienced Saturday nights.

“The way I’ve heard it a 100 times, is they just went up town and hung around...,” Miller said.

Young and old, farmer, businessman, laborer, Catholic and Lutheran, Miller said.
“They talked about the week’s activities,” Miller said.

Maybe he writes and talks with a sense of nostalgia, Miller said.

“I do feel nostalgic about small towns,” Miller said.

On the other hand, those who feel nostalgic can also be objective, and sometimes can be the harshest critics of small town life, he said.

Take authors Garrison Keillor and Sinclair Lewis as examples.

Yet, Kellen said, it isn’t nostalgia that makes her and Jensen choose the farm and small towns.

“I couldn’t live in a city,” Kellen said. “I know I’d go crazy if I had to sit in a cubicle and work in a city.”

For the past six years, Jensen said, the couple has been on an upper midwest tour living in small towns in several states.

People are skeptical, they said.

“Always, the first question is, ‘what are you going to do,’” Kellen said. “We’re picking the place and creating the job.”

The answer isn’t likely to be found in technology, Jensen said. They’ve worked for various food and produce growers and are attracted by the opportunity to grow food for people and not animals, they said.

They don’t need a lot of money, Jensen said. They know how to live on a shoe string.

Maybe the couple won’t ever be a part of reconstructing the Saturday night experience in a way that reestablishes the small-towns of the 1920s to early 1960s, Miller said.

But they are two people who are convinced that rural Minnesota has their future.