Here’s a fabulous place in a closely studied place: the Emma Chase Café in Chase County, Kansas. The county is the subject of William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth, which the author described as a deep map.
In 1984, the café was run by Linda Thurston, who had a Ph.D. in child psychology. She decided to return to her home in Cottonwood Falls, which was barely big enough to support a café. But people wanted a place to eat and meet. Merchants in what was left of downtown bought the building and leased it to Thurston on favorable terms. Volunteers helped with the restoration.
Thurston and her twin sister thought women were overlooked in Kansas, so they wanted to find a way to honor a woman that history had forgotten. While the café was being renovated, they announced the new place would be called the Emma Chase. She was not the wife, sister or daughter of Salmon P. Chase, for whom the county was named. She was her own woman.
Soon, newspaper ads for the café printed Emma’s chocolate chip cookie recipe, and they asked townspeople to search their attic trunks for information about her. One day Whitt Laughridge came in with a large, framed portrait of an unidentified woman he’d found in the historical society vault. Thurston said, Yes! At last we’ve got Emma!
The café was named for an important historical character who was completely imaginary. It was that kind of place.
Conventional wisdom says that a dwindling community will stay alive as long as it has a post office and a school.
My experience is that a community needs a café or coffeeshop. If a small town is the kind of place where everyone goes home and watches TV at night, it’s in trouble. If it has a place where people can go and talk, exchange ideas and plan joint ventures, there’s hope.
• Source: William Least Heat-Moon, PrairyErth; Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1991, p. 124.
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