Talking about suburban vs. urban childhoods in class this week got me thinking about how my childhood in a small town compares to these other two typologies. I grew up in Vernon, a small town in north west Texas. I'd consider it a bubble of sorts, but not so much a homogenous bubble like I imagine the suburbs are. While my friends and I were rather sheltered from what went on beyond our town, there were a lot of different things going on within it. All 8.1 square miles of it.
Where the hell is Vernon, Texas? Yeah, that's what everyone says.
Here. Yeah, that's it.
I kind of imagine it as a miniature, less intense version of a city: there were the older, nicer blocks, the projects/slums where most of the minority population lived, the elderly housing neighborhood, the middle class neighborhoods, and the recently emerging McMansion-esque cul-de-sac all within walking distance of each other. I think while there were these differentiations, they were not the extremes of each type that I think of at the city scale.
I know what you're thinking. There's nothing to do here. You're right. The nearest movie theater was 45 minutes away in Oklahoma. Ew. No bowling alley, no mall, not even a Walmart until my sophomore year of high school. (It was a big deal people!) But there was a TON of open space. There are three intentional parks in Vernon scattered with antique playground equipment, plus a seemingly unlimited amount of open fields and lots and backroads on which to trespass and entertain ourselves. Let's be honest. Since there weren't a lot of legal kid-friendly activities to keep us in line, a lot of kids found alternative entertainment early in life. Perhaps the lack of development is partially responsible for a high teen pregnancy rate, constant drug busts, and lots of MIPs.
Interestingly enough, upon some googling of my home sweet home and if there even exists any planning documentation, I found that since I've been away at school, Vernon has introduced a Community and Economic Devlopment Initiative. This plan outlines some objective and priorities for the town, and the lack of youth activities is addressed as the 7th highest priority. Bout time. Other areas of priority include improvements for the water quality, the interaction between the community and local governments, bringing in more companies to create jobs, highlighting the western heritage as an effort for tourist attraction, and beautification. I'm really interested to see how this goes.
Vernon was occupied as early as the middle of the 19th century by Tonkawa Indians, and soon became a trading center along the Great Western Cattle Trail and Chisholm Trail. The origin of “Vernon” is still debated; it either came from George Washington’s Mount Vernon, or from a traveling whiskey salesman named Vernon Brown. Either way, Vernon was soon appointed county seat of Wilbarger County and the Forth Worth- Denver City Railroad came to the area in the late 1880s.
The town developed linearly along Wilbarger Street, with two nodes of activity at the two highway intersections along Wilbarger. One of these nodes is the Wilbarger County Courthouse and the now ghost-town like downtown, which is another priority of the development initiative. Most of the commercial spaces, retail and cultural facilities are scattered along the Wilbarger, and both north and south of this corridor are various residential areas. The eastern and earliest part of the town’s streets are in a neatly gridded pattern, based on the cardinal directions with Main Street running north-south, while the western part of the town makes a disorganized shift to a northwest-southeast orientation. The shift might have happened because of different routes from the town to the nearby Pease River, or perhaps it happened after the highways were put in, since the northwest-southeast orientation follow the curve of state Highway 287.
Ok if you've made it this far, I'm impressed. I've spent way to much time looking into this. That's all for now.
www.vernontx.gov/index.aspx?nid=160
