This village of 150 souls doesn’t have so much as a video store, a pharmacy or an ice-cream stand, but it’s proud to have one thing nobody else has:
George Armstrong Custer.
Not his bones–they were buried at West Point after being retrieved from the Little Big Horn–but his birthplace, the spot where his family homestead once stood, a sloping spit of land now graced by a towering bronze statue, a picnic shelter and a pair of outhouses.
Maybe it seems odd to trumpet a connection to a general whose name is synonymous with military disaster. But people here are counting on Custer to ride to the rescue, to help revive beleaguered Harrison County by drawing regiments of military buffs to this isolated eastern Ohio province, once known for its rich coal production.
“When the mines started shutting down, that’s when `we’ started,” said Edgar Wallace, active in the Custer Memorial Association, which organizes the annual “Custer Days” festival here. “We’ve got it pretty well on its feet.”
All across the Rust Belt, small towns are turning to tourism for salvation, hoping to replace the wealth once generated by mines and steel mills with dollars mined from the pockets of out-of-town visitors.
In nearby Cadiz, also battered by mine closures, devotees of actor Clark Gable are rebuilding his boyhood home, convinced it will attract legions of “Gone With the Wind” aficionados.
In Sharon, Pa., where the rusting hulks of steel mills line the Shenango River, promoters opened the Vocal Group Hall of Fame in December. They say it will draw a million tourists a year.
In Youngstown, Ohio, once a world-class steelmaking behemoth, officials hope a labor-and-industry museum can lure people to a city now sorely lacking in real industry.
Troubled Steubenville, Ohio, started its tourism campaign from nothing more than a decade ago, asking artists to paint downtown buildings with bright, historical images–and then christening itself “The City of Murals.”
So far, they say, local restaurants and motels have been encouraged by busloads of tourists coming from as far away as Canada to see the paintings.
“People love them,” said Terry Lewis, who has seen business increase at her Terry’s Country Treasures. “I was surprised people come to see murals, but they do.”
However, some labor specialists predict little success for these struggling, postindustrial towns.
The hard fact, said John Russo, director of the Labor Studies Center at Youngstown State University, is that the reasons for the creation of many industrial communities no longer exist.
“I see this sort of Rust Belt theme-park stuff as kind of the last gasp of these communities whose time has come and gone,” Russo said. “It constitutes a kind of hope for a community, albeit a false hope sometimes.”
At Steubenville, Veterans Memorial Bridge is a soaring modern-art needle that spans the Ohio River, a futuristic gateway into a city built on the past. For generations, Steubenville and the surrounding region depended on mining and steelmaking, feeding off a rich, 12,000-square-mile coal range that snakes across eastern Ohio.
In 1970, the state’s mining industry produced 55 million tons of coal and employed 8,466 people. By 1996 production dropped to 28 million tons and employment to 3,448.
From 1981-91, the county lost 2,300 jobs, including 60 percent of its mining employment and a quarter of its manufacturing jobs, according to the Ohio Public Expenditure Council. Its population got smaller, by 16 percent. And it got poorer: In 1981, its per-capita income ranked 25th among Ohio’s 88 counties, while by 1991, it had dropped to 53rd.
Steubenville mirrored the county. More than a quarter of its residents moved away between 1970 and 1990, cutting the population from 30,495 to 22,125. Today nearly two-thirds of its families survive on welfare or Social Security payments.
Downtown is blemished by vacant storefronts and empty streets.
Against that backdrop of departure and destitution, city officials have pitted 26 colorful murals, depicting moments and people from Steubenville’s proud past. So far the pictures are attracting about 500 tour buses a year.
“We’ve had a mild success,” said Louise Snider, director of Steubenville City of Murals. “We’re hoping to catapult ourself into a major success.”
The newest mural was unveiled last year beside the Kroger food store, a portrayal of the late Dean Martin, born Dino Crocetti in 1917. The singer’s Steubenville fans are busily planning for June’s third annual Dean Martin birthday party. About 2,500 people attended last year.
“The fans are still out there, and the fans are still pilgrimming to Steubenville,” she said. “It’s getting like Elvis.”
Researchers say it may take Elvis Presley–or at least an Elvis-like attraction–to rejuvenate Rust Belt towns that teeter on the edge of extinction. Even successful tourism programs tend to produce mostly low-wage jobs.
“Are those (tourist) industries likely to provide those kind of jobs–real, high-wage jobs, for big chunks of the community? Probably not,” said Lisa Frank, a history professor at Carlow College in Pittsburgh who studies the changing direction of steel towns. “For workers and communities, they’re poor replacements.”
As for Custer, he left the area as a child, although that doesn’t get much emphasis here in New Rumley. Local enthusiasts talk about Custer’s bravery, his leadership, how his famed Michigan brigade defeated Jeb Stuart’s men at Gettysburg.
One local publication calls Custer “the hero of the Little Big Horn” and a battle summary at his birthplace concludes, “There is no consensus about what really happened.” Except that Custer and his troops were wiped out by plains Indians, and the defeat has come to rank with the Alamo in the annals of military annihilation.
