| Before East Palestine, Ohio became a headline, a hashtag, and the new Love Canal, it was a little-known municipality, population 4,761, near Ohio’s border with Pennsylvania. In 2011, its status was downgraded from “city” to “village” due to declining population.
And in that way that many Midwestern towns can be heavily industrialized and intensely rural at the same time, East Palestine, in its pre-Rust Belt days, both made a lot of stuff and grew a lot of stuff. There were ceramics plants and tire manufacturing plants, along with foundries and factories that produced steel tanks, fireproofing materials, and electrical wiring. At the same time, there were—and still are—lots of surrounding orchards, with all the attendant infrastructure, storage and preserving facilities to process apples, peaches, and pears. And, as is typical of most Midwestern towns, a railroad runs through East Palestine. Even before the Civil War, the central Midwest had built a prolific network of tracks that connected all the cities together and traversed countless neighborhoods in cities and villages alike. By 1860, 80 percent of Corn Belt farms were located no more than five miles away from a railway.
What the low whistle of a freight train in the night signaled was grain, lumber, hogs, cattle, and coal on the move. More than 160 years later, the same railroad tracks of the Midwest still bisect the region’s backyards, but what the railcars carry has changed greatly. |
