Special Section: Small Town Soul

“The Southern States are an aggregate, in fact, of communities, not of individuals,” said John C. Calhoun in 1838. The plantation communities that he was describing have long since disappeared. Yet the South is still an aggregate of communities, the cohesiveness now embodied in myriad small towns that form the backbone of the region. The South has more old towns with fewer than 7,500 residents than any other region in the nation. Both pilloried and praised by native writers, the small town remains the custodian of the Southern lifestyle. The home town’s values, perceptions, even its personal style of politics, define in many ways the Southernness of the South.

Most of the towns are mainstreet hamlets, their once glorious centers gently crumbling away while small industry and chain stores encroach on the fringes. There are the Greek Revival houses, the ubiquitous Baptist and Methodist churches, Confederate statues and, always, in the county seats, the courthouse squares. The residents know everyone and everyone’s business. Ultimately there grows a deep sense of belonging, of defining one’s life through one’s place in the community.

Urbanization, desegregation and television have all affected the small Southern towns. Most are now no more than 90 minutes down the road from some city. People frequently go there for shopping and entertainment. Still, at least for the time being, rapid growth has passed the little places by.

So it is in Chatham, Va., a community of 1,822 residents not far from a highway connecting it with Greensboro, N.C., and beyond. In the center of town is the courthouse of Pittsylvania County —named after William Pitt the Elder, who was the Earl of Chatham. Chatham boasts the elegant, Episcopal-run Chatham Hall school for girls on one side of town and the Hargrave Military Academy on the other, as well as 19th-century wooden houses with broad front lawns and wide verandas.

TIME Correspondent Joseph Kane visited Chatham for several days to chat with the townfolk. His report:

Mayor Samuel McCabe Hairston, 49, stopped in at Woodfin’s Pharmacy first thing on this rainy day, for everyone he needed to see would be there. The entire business community drops in at Woodfin’s for coffee at 9 o’clock each morning, after picking up the mail at the post office, to discuss the current drought and other local problems. Said an attorney in the crowd: “We are a very small town and we want to keep it that way. Everybody knows everybody else —Morning, Bruce—and the chances are that you are related to them.”

As in most towns, a person is known by his family’s reputation. “In all honesty, I will never be able to belong,” says Bruce Elliott, a New Jerseyite who married a local woman and bought the Chatham hardware store. The pedigreed residents never exclude him from their conversations, he explains, but when they compare cousins and accomplishments, he has nothing to offer to match his wife’s family heritage.

Times are rough right now in Chatham, both for the farmers with their puny, drought-burned tobacco leaves and for the folks in the stores, which are hurting for customers. “Nowadays, you are lucky if you can farm, keep your place clean and pay your taxes,” complains Frank Pierce, 56, an archetypal Southern farmer in bib overalls. He says that many farmers are turning to moonshine whisky to see them through. Even so, there is a basic optimism. “Folks can do all right,” maintains Mayor Hairston.

Physically, blacks and whites live close together in Chatham. “We don’t have those subdivisions like you have in the North,” says Hairston. Some 40% of the voters in the county are “Nigras,” and Joseph Galloway, a black, is on the town council. But the barriers remain. Says Sam Swanson, a white: “Let’s face it: the white man is afraid of the black man. The trust is there with those blacks we work with, but they are called Uncle Toms.”

To Charles M. Miller, black pastor of the pentecostal First Church of Jesus and director of the Community Action Program, Chatham is a “reserved town of established families who want to keep it as it is.” Adds Miller: “They are not openly trying to destroy black folks. They just ignore us.”

But there is also Frances Hallam Hurt’s view of Chatham. The epitome of the genteel Southern lady, she sees Chatham, from the vantage point of her nearby estate, as “the last outpost of the good life—and surprisingly kind.”