WHEN it comes to civic duty, few Americans can compete with Elsie Eiler. In Monowi, in northern Nebraska, she is the mayor, town clerk, town treasurer, town secretary, tavern keeper and chief librarian. When you are the sole resident of America’s smallest incorporated township — everybody else has either died or moved on — the competition for jobs is scarce.
Mrs Eiler, 71, whose husband died in 2001, halving Monowi’s population, runs the one business left in town, a low-slung roadside tavern. Last year she opened what has become the greatest source of pride for the town board — Mrs Eiler, that is — a tiny library, which was the dying wish of her husband, who was a farmer and an avid collector of books.
Drive towards Monowi and the vast, empty landscape — giant stubble fields punctuated by occasional grain silos — overwhelms towns struggling to withstand decades of population decline. That same slow death is occurring across America’s rural heartland in the Midwest and Great Plains.
As you drive, the town signs zip by: Maskell, population 54; Obert, 39; Verdel, 12; and then, placed there before Mr Eiler’s death, Monowi, 2.
Monowi is an extraordinary sight. Surrounded by wild trees, old cars and tonnes of junk sit about a dozen one-storey wooden houses, all abandoned, some so long ago, between the world wars, that they are close to collapse. It is utterly silent.
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A rusting yellow school bus, stripped of wheels, engine and seats, sits beside a decrepit one-room schoolhouse closed 40 years ago. Next to Mrs Eiler’s tavern sits an old clapboard building — filled with sacks of rubbish — that used to be one of the town’s two general stores before they closed in the 1950s. The last event at Monowi’s boarded-up Methodist Church was the funeral of Mrs Eiler’s father in 1960.
Inside the tavern, Mrs Eiler is reading a novel. “I picked it up from the library on the way home last night,” she said. Her commute is a short one. The library is 10 yards away, her home another 20.
At its peak, in the 1930s, Monowi was a thriving town of 150. The local railroad, which ran from Norfolk, Nebraska, to Winner, South Dakota, brought farmers and their families. But mechanisation put small farmers out of business, the railway closed in 1971 and the town began to die. Three years ago the last resident apart from the Eilers, an elderly widow, moved away to live with her son.
Now Mrs Eiler is alone, dutifully carrying out administrative chores of Kafkaesque absurdity. She grants her own liquor licence and collects taxes from herself. Every year she must produce a municipal road plan to receive Monowi’s share of state transport funds and a budget to finance the town’s street lights — all four of them.
She produced the Notice of Public Hearing that is posted in the tavern window, announcing a public hearing “before the Village Board” and calling on the citizens of Monowi to voice “support, opposition and/or suggestions” for the road plan. The meeting was quick. “It was just for town residents,” she said with a laugh.
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Her son and daughter left years ago. “It’s a lack of being able to make a living that’s killing these towns,” she said. “The young folk graduate and go to bigger places to get work. The small farmers and businessman have been squeezed out.”
The facts bear her out. In Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, North Dakota, South Dakota and Iowa, 89 per cent of the 2,421 cities and towns have fewer than 3,000 people. Hundreds have fewer than 1,000. Between 1996 and 2004, almost 500,000 people, nearly half with college degrees, left the six states, which have a combined population of nine million. “Rural flight” has become so acute that some towns offer free land and tax breaks to entice newcomers.
But Mrs Eiler is not lonely. Her food is good, the beer is cold and farmers and truck drivers travel as far as 80 miles to eat at her tavern. When The Times visits, she serves lunch to a petrol deliveryman and his wife, a couple from a nearby farm and her brother, Jim, who in 1956 moved to Verdel, the “big town”, population 52, seven miles away. “When I moved there, hell, Verdel even had a bank!” he said.
Mrs Eiler said that her son would love to take over the tavern, but obtaining a fresh licence would require prohibitive renovation funds.
“Some day Monowi will just be memories, and as the years go by, it will probably turn to dust. But I like it here, and as long as I can take care of myself, I’ll be staying,” she said.