Small towns need a Plan B (Sat. Evening Post)
This country is littered with dying small towns that lacked a plan B, one they should have had in place before the mill shut down or the factory moved to Mexico. Mount Shasta, California, and Ashland, Oregon, did it right. Located in the California-Oregon border region where I live, they avoided economic devastation by having their survival plans well underway by the time their lumber mills began to shut down more than a half-century ago. Indeed, Mount Shasta was more than 100 years ahead of the curve thanks to a guy named Justin Hinckley Sisson, who planted the seeds for the town’s future reinvention as a recreational tourist destination. A schoolteacher from Connecticut, Sisson moved out West and reinvented himself as a rugged outdoorsman. In 1866 he opened a hotel and restaurant on the lower slopes of Mount Shasta and started taking his visitors on hunting, fishing, and mountain-climbing excursions. The timber boom that had begun around that time had pretty well petered out by 1990,