Main Street Blues: The Decline of Small-Town America

Richard O. Davies takes the reader through two hundred years of American history as reflected in the small Ohio farming village of Camden. Davies describes the development of the relatively self-sufficient community that emerged from the Ohio land rush of the early nineteenth century, a community that reached its apex during the 1920s and then entered into a period of slow decline caused by forces beyond its control. He details the roles of land speculation, the railroad era, the impact of the automobile, the emergence of a tightly knit community, and finally the post-World War II loss of business and population to the nearby cities of Dayton, Hamilton, and Cincinnati.