"Tenney" is Officially History

A college roommate's wedding in July 2000 led me to the iconic road trip in west-central Minnesota where I first visited Tenney, at the time Minnesota's smallest incorporated town (population 4).  A massive grain elevator attached to a half dozen huge grain bins camouflages the town from state highway 55, but a curious passerby can't resist taking the left-hand turn to see the town behind the towering agriculture structure.  Particularly back in 2000, Tenney was a spooky site to behold, the decayed, vacant remains of a once more vibrant little town that at its peak had nearly 200 residents in 1910 and still had 19 people as recently as 1980. The remnants of the town's past remained intact, with nearly a dozen long-ago abandoned homes along with an old church and creamery stood there hauntingly, complete with many years of unattended weeds flapping in the wind.  And right in the middle of this post-apocalyptic vision were two trailers where the four residents of Tenney lived.  I couldn't imagine waking up every morning and being greeted by this hellscape, yet for many years these people did.

I had an immediate visceral attachment to the general west-central Minnesota area and have returned there most of the past 15 years for additional road trips.  I read in the past few years of Tenney's ongoing problems.  The city clerk had stolen city money several years ago, even though I can't seem to find any record of that online now.  And as the costs for operating the most basic functions of city government grew prohibitive, the remaining residents voted by a 2-1 margin to dissolve the town in 2011.  Fast forward to this past weekend and I drove through Tenney again, noticing that the sign for the town was now gone completely.  Turning left past the elevator to explore, only a handful of the abandoned homes remain with only one trailer in the middle of the town still around, and that was clearly empty.  The population of Tenney has officially declined to 0. 

The town's era had passed and given how ugly it's been for so long, it's hard to feel too much sadness for it ultimately being put to sleep.  Sadder to me is the likelihood that there will be many more Tenney stories in western Minnesota in the decades to come, with dozens of dying little towns that have been in freefall for my entire life and show no signs of a reversal of fortune.  The boom and bust cycle is the nature of the human settlement pattern but it seems quite wasteful to me that dozens of perfectly functional rural communities with a good housing stock and functional city infrastructures are being left to rot as settlement consolidates on the periphery of already overcrowded metro areas, requiring the creation of new pavement, housing, and infrastructure to serve the people who vacated the small towns.  In time I believe soaring energy costs will make our current settlement trends unsustainable and force people back to smaller communities, but at least for now energy prices are plummeting which means expansionist exurban settlement will press forward.  While the low gas prices this summer are nice, I can't help but feel it will give us the false sense of security that will lead us to dig our hole even deeper with exurban sprawl that will ultimately prove unsustainable when the demand for energy inevitably exceeds supply again.  But even if my long-held theory that higher energy prices will shift settlement patterns in the generation to come, it's a safe bet that the transition will come too late to save Tenney.