Small Town Spotlight: Leaving a legacy and embracing progress

By Emily Bontrager, Reilly Gaunt, Thomas Harding, Kenzie Ogden, Nick Windsor and Issac Wolf

Across Grant County, small-town citizens discuss what makes their communities legendary and what the future of these towns may look like.

Establishing Grant County

Grant County Historian Bill Munn talks about the history of Grant County:

Bill Munn (Photo Credit: The History Center at Marion Public Library)

Expanding community

Since the gas boom that originally brought many people to Grant County, the population of many small towns in the county has been on the decline.

Remy Locke, a Ball State University student studying Urban Planning, has been helping with revitalization efforts in the town of Swayzee, a town with a yearly population decline around 1%.

“If you look at the rate of decline in population since like 1970, it’s remained consistent since then,” said Locke. “There’s a loss of about like eight to 10 people per year, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but the community is only about 1,000 people.”

Compared to the surrounding counties, Grant County has a smaller population, especially when compared to Allen County, home to the city of Fort Wayne.

Grant County’s population is mostly white. The county’s Black, Asian, Native American and Mixed Race communities make up 12.5% of the population combined.

Due to differing populations, Marion and other towns in Grant County do not have as many parks as bigger cities. However, a handful of new parks and green spaces have opened in Grant County in the past year.

Tim Voss, owner of Voss Landworks, said that parks help to fill the space left by abandoned buildings that have been torn down.

“As businesses kind of leave, you have these downtowns that have some empty lots,” Voss said. “And so coming back and taking that, you know, property, and reclaiming it and building a beautiful green space is bringing some life back into the downtown.”

Voss said that he can not talk specifically about all the projects that his company has planned for next year, but that more parks and community spaces are in the works.

Rebuilding

Several communities in the county have begun revitalization efforts to make life better in their community. 

Don Thompson is the president of the newly developed Swayzee Economic Development Corporation. 

“We started (the corporation) last September, so we’re about one year into it,” said Thompson. 

Thompson said that the town of Swayzee is not a part of the Grant County Economic Growth Council. The Swayzee Economic Development Corporation provides the community with a way to improve the town in ways that county resources are not able to help with. 

Swayzee has also partnered with students from Ball State University’s Urban Planning Department to put together a comprehensive plan to make improvements to the town. 

“As was the case with Swayzee, they called me and asked that we help them prepare a comprehensive plan,” said Dr. Michael Burayidi, a Ball State professor and the faculty adviser for this project. “In the last seven years my classes have prepared over 15 comprehensive plans across Indiana, and so they may have heard from other communities about what we are doing in the department.” 

Kayla Ferguson, one of the Ball State students working on the project, said that the team did research on the community’s assets and public services.

“We looked at, like, the infrastructure, the sidewalks, the road systems and just got kind of an idea of what they had,” Ferguson said. “And then we also had a community meeting to hear their input which was really interesting.” 

The students individually surveyed every piece of land within city limits and put together a census that was filled out by almost 200 members of the community. 

“People are very, very helpful,” said Remy Locke, another Ball State Urban Planning student. “The people of Swayzee are obviously very passionate about the place that they live, and that’s really good for us, because they’ve been very forthcoming about, ‘here’s what’s great, here’s what we need to keep, but also here’s what’s wrong,’ because they want to help their town.”

Several new parks and other amenities have also recently opened in the county. 

Tim Voss, owner of Voss Landworks said that his company tackled several landscaping and parks projects in Grant County and the surrounding areas. 

“Down in the Marion, Grant County area we did three parks; one in Matthews, one in Jonesboro and one in Marion,” Voss said. 

Voss’s company does a lot of projects in the Fort Wayne area, but he is originally from Upland. 

“Connection is everything in business, you know, relationships,” Voss said. “So, we have a lot of relationships down here.”

Cayla Duckwall, owner of the Van Buren small business Mama Duck’s said that local businesses and organizations provide meeting places for people in the community.

Duckwell’s shop opened in 2022 and provides a space for local vendors to sell their crafts.

“We’re continuing to build and trying to just bring stuff to this area because we live in the middle of nowhere,” said Duckwall, “Just getting those community members together is a big deal.”

Leaving a Legacy

Keeping the history of the town in mind, residents of Grant County are looking to the future while trying to preserve the town’s legacy. 

Andy Horner, a Converse library director who has served on several boards for town and community organizations said he thinks that Grant County has made a legacy for itself through local sports. 

“High school sports are such a big part of small town life,” said Horner. “You see whole communities rally around whatever sports team happens to be on fire that year.”

Muareen Dalrumple of Swayzee said that sports is also something that is a big part of her community’s legacy. 

“It’s the only Swayzee in the world, with nine basketball overtimes, which is a part of my history,” Dalrumple said. 

Horner said that generational families also add to the community’s legacy. 

“Especially in our case where rural agriculture is concerned, we see lots of families that have third, fourth, even fifth and sixth generation farmers,” Horner said. “They farm this land, their parents, their grandparents farmed this land, and that’s a huge legacy because it means that they’re putting money, time, effort, roots down into a community, and then staying.” 

Horner said the reason he is so involved in his community is because he feels a strong sense of civic duty and enjoys engaging with the people in his town. 

“One of my favorite things here as the library director is I get to watch our kids grow up” Horner said. “They come into the library as kids, and I watch them move from young readers just starting out, to elementary kids to high school kids.”

“You can wish you had a better community, or you can do something to make it what you want.”

John Bryan, Swayzee Volunteer Fire Department