Readers of this site might be interested in a recent Daily Yonder newsstory on job creation in southeastern Ohio.  This Ford Foundation-underwritten project is trying to create rural jobs by adding value to locally sourced raw commodities, and finding markets for the finished products.  In this case, the commodity is wood, and the value is being added by firms from the region surrounding the small town of  Trimble, Ohio (pop. 470).  For the story, jump here.

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Katherine Dalton
Katherine Dalton
Katherine Dalton has worked as a magazine editor, freelance feature writer and book editor.  She started in journalism in college, working at The Yale Literary Magazine during most of its controversial few years as a national magazine of opinion based at Yale.  She then worked briefly at Harper's magazine in New York, and more extensively at Chronicles magazine in Illinois, where she was a contributing editor for many years.  She has has written for various publications ranging from the Wall Street Journal to the University Bookman, and was a contributor to Wendell Berry: Life and Work and Localism in the Mass Age: A Front Porch Republic Manifesto.  She lives in her native Kentucky.

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3 COMMENTS

  1. Thanks for the post – the story reminded me of Wendell Berry’s “Conserving Forest Communities”, the gist of which I remembered, specifically the part about the Menominee up north. What I forgot was the title and author, so it took me some time to find the essay again.
    What’s interesting to me is that it’s part of the working out of some ideas that Deneen makes plain in his post about Community AND Liberty. What the people in the story are talking about doing is farming and making things, as far as I can tell. But it seems revolutionary. And I guess it’s hard to understand why it’s such a shift if there’s not a corresponding understanding of the sense of powerlessness that seems so common in rural areas. Without government help or a large corporation deciding to locate around here, there’s a feeling that there’s not much we can do. So a big part of the process ends up being the reconstruction of communities of proper scale; some effort to reconstruct those structures that we can rely upon as a counterweight to the leviathans.
    That it seems such a revolutionary idea and so difficult to get off the ground speaks, I think, both to the degree to which we’ve become atomized individuals and to just how much has been lost.
    Sorry for not being more concise, but heck, Deneen’s essay was two days long. Hard to splice something like that into your story. I think the two go hand-in-hand.

  3. Thanks for this, its going straight to the local Land Trusts.

    Unfortunately, we have a glut of lumber right now.

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