Back Home by Chris Hardie
I grew up in a rural community and am proud of it.
I was a farm kid living at the end of a dead-end road in a town of about 500 folks scattered throughout the 36 square miles. Our cultural center was maybe two dozen residents who lived in a few houses around the Franklin Store and my grandfather’s former gas station across the road.
The closest larger communities were Melrose, Ettrick, Taylor and Blair, all about 10 miles as the crow flies from our farm. Melrose and Ettrick hovered around 450 residents and Taylor was about 350. Blair was a city of 1,000 and had a plethora of shopping options – several restaurants, hardware stores, two grocery stores, a lumber yard, car dealer, pharmacy and even a Radio Shack store.
Today all of those businesses are gone, with a few bars and eating establishments and a few retailers remaining. There are empty buildings and some of the former downtown businesses are converted to housing.
I am not picking on Blair, a community where I have fond memories and is home to lots of good folks. But the story of Blair can be repeated all over Wisconsin and in other rural parts of our country. It’s a story about a community that once had a thriving commercial center with businesses that were supported by the surrounding small family farms.
Most of that small farm economy has disappeared, along with the small businesses it supported. Also gone are the larger farm families that once helped fill our classrooms. What remains are smaller communities with aging housing stock, declining school enrollment and downtown commercial districts needing a new entrepreneurial purpose.
It’s one of the stories of rural Wisconsin, where challenges and opportunities intersect in smaller communities. It’s also one of the focuses of the Rural Policy Institute (RPI), a nonpartisan coalition that is trying to create a unified voice for rural Wisconsin. The organization was established in 2024 by the Wisconsin Farm Bureau, Wisconsin Towns Association and Wisconsin Electric Cooperative Association.
Recently I attended the first Rural Policy Institute Summit held in Stevens Point, hosted by the Wisconsin Institute for Sustainable Technology at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. More than 100 people from rural partners around the state gathered to engage and collaborate in small group discussions.
I was invited to attend because of my role as head of the 7 Rivers Alliance, a regional economic development organization serving western Wisconsin. I have put helping rural communities high on our organization’s priority list and recently announced a $250,000 grant program to assist businesses in communities of 4,000 or less.
Mike Koles, executive director of the Wisconsin Towns Association, opened the summit by using a comparison to the David v. Goliath story in the Bible. He said David was really not the underdog because of his choice of weaponry in slaying Goliath. “Rural areas are not the underdogs,” Koles said.
Other speakers included John Miller, the CEO and president of the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp., which has given RPI a $100,000 Capacity Building Grant to develop a playbook on economic development initiatives that advance rural priorities in Wisconsin.
Miller talked about WEDC’s Office of Rural Prosperity and its Thrive Rural program, which works with local economic development organizations to launch projects to create thriving communities.
Clara Hedrick of the LaClare Family Creamery in Malone, WI talked about building the business milking dairy goats and the creation of the Quality Dairy Goat Producers Cooperative of Wisconsin, which serves 150 family farms.
Rural Wisconsin is not just about small communities and farms, but also about forestry, an important message shared by Paul Fowler, executive director of the Wisconsin Institute for Sustainable Technology.
Forests cover half of Wisconsin and the forestry industry supports 57,000 jobs and contributes $24 billion annually to the state’s economy, Fowler said.
In between speakers we had small group table discussions on topics like sharing rural Wisconsin success stories, advocating for rural Wisconsin and how we move forward together.
But what is rural? Last year RPI issued a report called “Rural-Urban Balance in Wisconsin” which defined Wisconsin’s population as being 41% rural or rural adjacent. It’s a needed update on the rural classification used by the US Census Bureau that said any municipality of 2,500 or more was no longer rural. Medium-density municipalities larger than 2,500 which are not part of a larger metro but instead are surrounded by rural areas are classified as rural adjacent. That covers many Wisconsin communities.
I was impressed with the gathering, the caliber of the participants, their knowledge and their passion for rural Wisconsin. Bob Welch, executive director of RPI, said highlights from the table discussions and the summit will be aggregated for future next steps to deal with challenges and opportunities in rural infrastructure, healthcare, workforce, education, economic development, the urban-rural divide, broadband and others.
That’s not to say our cities and metro areas aren’t important. When our cities sneeze, rural folks catch the cold. But we must create a healthy, vibrant Wisconsin that makes all of our communities strong.
We can’t turn back the clocks, but we can create a new future.
As a proud farm boy, I will roll up my sleeves and help where I can.
Chris Hardie spent more than 30 years as a reporter, editor
