SMALL TOWN SOLUTIONS – Staying Vital in Rural Iowa | News, Sports, Jobs

PARKERSBURG – After a deadly tornado in 2008 and the murder of a beloved community leader a year later, many people in Parkersburg felt they could take just about any punch.

Then came the coronavirus pandemic. He killed people and bit companies.

But as with those earlier tragedies, the people of Parkersburg weren’t about to be defined by this latest challenge.

Instead, they defined themselves by what they would do to overcome – support each other.

The Aplington-Parkersburg High School activity board takes pride of place on Highways 14/57 in Parkersburg, across from MidWest One Bank.

The pandemic was a different challenge. It was more insidious than the May 25, 2008 tornado, which left six people dead in the city and two in nearby New Hartford. It was less shocking than the gunshot death in 2009 of Aplington-Parkersburg high school football coach Ed Thomas.

The pandemic has claimed about as many lives as the tornado in one year. Although the pandemic did not cause any property damage, it still blocked businesses, as part of a state-ordered shutdown.

The city persevered. Parkersburg had put in place several efforts that helped him find his way, including a strong sense of community. This is a trait common to small towns despite trends of rural decline. IowaWatch has spent four months examining what lies behind the success of successful cities of 5,000 people or less. This included visits to 58 small towns that oppose declining population trends. These cities are built on the engagement of residents, businesses coming together, a mix of public and local funding, strong schools and a sense of community, IowaWatch found.

While many rural towns suffer from population decline, Parkersburg has grown. It had 2,015 inhabitants in 2020 against 1,870 in 2010, according to census data. The IowaWatch project looked at communities that are growing in population, but also those with strong main streets and other characteristics that lead to success.

At Parkersburg, these traits include committed leaders and volunteers, strong schools, and a strong community.

Take John Luhring, for example. When a long-standing local hardware store closed after 45 years, Luhring made a business plan and opened his own hardware store in early 2018. Two years later, the pandemic struck. The store remained open, considered an essential business.

The store flourished as people limited their travel to nearby large towns and kept their businesses closer to home.

Luhring, driven by his success, bought gift cards from several local businesses, some of which closed during the pandemic. He gave these cards to his customers, encouraging them to patronize these local businesses – if not immediately, then when they were able to reopen as pandemic conditions improved.

“Last year during the pandemic, because so many businesses were forced to close, I felt so blessed that I could be open. I started with a local hair salon. I literally took some money from our business and gave it to the local barber shop and said “Give me a gift certificate.” “

He didn’t stop there. Car dealers, grocery store. Then others started to do it. “For me it was just a ‘pay it forward’,” said Luhring.

“It’s something I love to do – support the community and give back what it has given me.

Luhring’s parents run a monument business and his brother is the city administrator. He barely had time to converse on a visit in May – a good indication of his neighbors “Buy local” shopping habits during the pandemic had remained.

As Luhring saw, buying habits may have been permanently altered to the benefit of local businesses, said Dan Bruns, local banker and member of city council.

“During the pandemic, people were afraid to go to big box stores; they were afraid to go to the big grocery stores ” in large neighboring communities, Bruns said.

“One of the challenges we faced with local businesses was getting people to buy locally. The pandemic has changed that from the hardware store to the grocery store you can get the same things here and you don’t have to drive. People have to recognize that every dollar spent in this community is a dollar that stays here ”, he said.

These decisions also generate local tax revenues for the benefit of local public services.

Likewise, community projects and initiatives continued, Bruns said. Fundraising and work persisted on Diamonds and Fields, a disabled-accessible recreation complex, which caught the attention of the Variety Club of Iowa.

Bruns said that the people of his town have a quality that, while not unique, is hard-won.

“It’s gravel” he said. “We have learned a lot. We learned a lot after the tornado. Some things are beyond your control. The pandemic is the same. You do what you need to do to be safe and try to help people as much as you can ”, he said.

This included, first of all, making sure that public security personnel were safe. “And over the year we tried – when life was not normal – we tried to stay as close to normal as possible, given the parameters given by the governor.”

In March 2020, Governor Kim Reynolds closed schools and restricted some activities. The first cases of coronavirus in Iowa were recorded on March 8, 2020.

Parkersburg kept the public library open to check out items, even though people couldn’t linger inside. In the summer, that meant keeping the pools open on a limited basis, with advance registration for a limited number of children at a time in two-hour shifts.

Organized sports teams were canceled, despite a relatively new sports complex.

At the bank, Bruns said, as the walk-in business was closed, staff reached out to customers.

An open house and senior customer social clubs have stopped coming together during the pandemic.

“For some people, walking into the bank and talking to someone for five or 10 minutes while making a deposit might be their only communication with the outside world. If you take that off because of the pandemic… there are just a few things we needed to do. We have tried to be as proactive as possible.

The bank also processed over $ 2 million in Paycheck Protection Plan business loans.

READ MORE: HOW A HANDFUL OF IOWA CITIES GROWING, RISE ABOVE RURAL DECLINE

“I think we have had an economic impact on those who have been affected”, he said. “I think it comes down to the neighbors who help the neighbors. This is what we did after the tornado. And I hate that Parkersburg is still associated with this tornado. But it will be. EF-5, half of the city destroyed. We have learned a lot from this. “

He continued: “We have seen tragedies, we have seen crises, we have seen obstacles that others may not have. And once again, it is a testament to our courage ”, Bruns said. “I don’t mean to say the pandemic was easy. Because it wasn’t. But it was definitely easier than a tornado.

Parkersburg city administrator Chris Luhring said that while these earlier challenges may have led to an initial overconfidence in the face of the pandemic, it has revealed how similar the residents are.

“At the end of the day, people were very supportive of the decisions we had to make and they were very supportive of our local businesses.”

The IowaWatch reporting in this project was made possible through support from the Solutions Journalism Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to rigorous and compelling reporting on responses to social issues.

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