Small towns are disappearing. I hadn’t thought much about small towns before moving to Huntingdon, Pennsylvaniato go to college. I had lived in suburbia all of my conscious life. But whileattending Juniata College, I fell in love with small town living. I love beingable to walk almost every place I need to visit regularly - the post office,the public library, the supermarket, the medical office, the church, the theater, and restaurants. Regretfully, Huntingdon, like so many small towns, is in danger of disappearing as a small town. Several years ago a WalMart opened up on the outskirts of town.  Strip malls have been drawing customers away from the downtown area and customers are being drawn away from the downtown area and into the suburban style malls around the outskirts of the town.

Small towns are losing theircharacter by losing their unique neighborhoods.  A good example is that in Huntingdon new suburban neighborhoods have been developed which are not walking distance from downtown and are very uniform in architectural style.  One of the wonderful things about Huntingdon is the historical buildings and architectural designs that are brought together into avery beautiful collage of urban functional integration. The newly created neighborhoods do not have this character. Small town living is not possible in a suburban development because you do not have the same small businesses,close-by institutions and the people who run them, readily available to you to make a difference in your lifestyle and world perception. Is the democracy as we know it in the United States of America a creature of small towns and cursed to disappear because of the disappearance of small towns?  Save the small towns, just in case this means that we are, in turn, saving democratic citizenship in the United States.