cute story.

i really enjoyed reading this cute little tale of how a small nebraska town came together to take back their future.

The people of Hooper — population 827, more or less — knew what this meant. The small green sign planted beside the new highway barely whispered their town’s name. And in the flat terrain of rural Nebraska, the eye can see far into the distance, yet miss so much. They feared being missed. Bypassed.

Another community might have resigned itself to this subtle humiliation, enduring the slight on behalf of rural America as just one more nudge toward oblivion. But Hooper was determined to raise its collective hand somehow, and say to the busy world:

We are still here.

“We kind of lost our identity now that the highway didn’t go through town,” said David Hingst, 58, the general manager of Hoegemeyer Hybrids, a local seed company. “We needed our identity brought back.”

But how? (via)