For the next two and a half centuries the rivers would exert a powerful decentralizing effect upon settlement from New England to the Spanish territory in Texas. Explorers, pioneers, and settlers followed the rivers upward from the coast and as the rivers divided, so too did the settlers, parting waters and ways and sequestering themselves into every tiny stream course in the countryside. For many years, the edge of the frontier was defined by an irregular line in any watershed where cabins were constructed at the spring at the uppermost limit of any streamlet in the watershed. The dendritic branching of the rivers into increasingly smaller and more divided streams exercised a powerful scattering effect upon early American settlement. The formation of a community, of the creation of a stable focus of collective residential life, was always problematic over against the unraveling thread of the streams.
Yet communities appeared, by the dozens and then hundreds and then thousands. And often, the germ of the early community was a geographic node related to the stream system: the fall line as the head of navigation, a sharp bend in a river, a shoal or rapid, a fork in the river, a safe eddy after a dangerous passage of rocks or rapids, the entry of a tributary stream. These were the places where boats were poled ashore, where lines were run out to trees, where duffels and barrels were carried ashore and piled and where camp was made. Communities were seeded in other ways, of course, in relation to other kinds of topographic features, but the foundational effect of the nodes of waterways is typical. The node caused a concentration, a narrowing, a focus of sight and material and people. The fork, the high bluff above the flood, the narrow bend that could be defended--all these became "centers," zones of human and material concentration that enabled effort to endure locally from one year to the next.
Communities must have some coherent principle, some organizing factor or focal point. As settlement matures and as the frontier passes into the domesticated landscape, communities are founded in other kinds of locations than those defined by primal topography of the frontier landscape. A community may arise, for instance, where two paths or roads intersect. Or a community may be intentionally founded simply for the sake of convenience in relation to a surrounding area such as a county. Across Tennessee we see row after row of counties characterized cartographically by a centered county seat from which radiates spokes of roads. Sometimes the "centering" symbolism of this arrangement is heightened by the formal design of town-square planning which locates either the city hall or the town courthouse in the center of the square and, hence, also in the center of the county. Winchester, TN is an excellent example of this kind of planning.
Some communities become centered upon an institutional feature. Besides courthouses, community center points include schools, churches, stores, industrial sites, or a military base. Midway community near Sewanee centers upon a convenience market. The Centennial community between Cowan and Winchester centers upon a grocery store. Alto community centers upon a tiny store in combination with a grain storage facility. Marble Hill is a cluster of six or eight houses around a country church. The tiny Summerfield community between Monteagle and Tracy City centered upon a coal loading station. Once the institution is founded in a place and residences begin to converge upon it, other institutional buildings may follow. Broadview on Rt. 50 has been defined for years by little more than an intersection and a store. In the last few years, however, more houses have been built around the store, then a nursery farm opened, then a boat storage shed opened, and most recently a fire station has been constructed.
A community may attain an early peak and then subsist for decades at a relatively low level of population and organization. Marble Hill, Lois, Harmony, Belvedere and dozens of other hamlets exhibit minimal community organization. Communities develop, however, and the final metamorphosis of a hamlet may be centuries later the appearance of a metropolis or mega-city. Nashville, Chattanooga, Memphis, and Knoxville began as little more than barricaded encampments around large fire pits.
We must keep in mind in assessing a community--whether it is in an early evolutionary form or is highly developed--the relationship between the community and its surrounding dependent area. This relationship typically conforms to the "core-periphery" model with the centered community defining the core and a less well defined zone or zones of dependency arrayed around the core. In Harmony, TN this zone is very small--extending at most a few hundred yards around the remnants of two old stores there. In Atlanta, the zone of peripheral dependency extends for hundreds of miles in every direction from that city. In most communities a healthy two-way flow of authority, influence, economy, and socialization takes place between the core and the periphery: people go to town, go to the country; the store stockpiles goods purchased by the farm people; the sheriff leaves the courthouse to patrol in the county; people go to town to see the doctor, the Senior Citizens bus circulates through the countryside.
Communities become dysfunctional or atrophy when the two-way directionality of focus/dependency is broken or violated. Healthy communities remain healthy by finding multiple ways to integrate the periphery into the life of the core and to strengthen the two-way relationship. In Franklin county, the topography of the valley floor where the county center and demographic core exists is physically separated from a hinterland of a high plateau periphery. Historically it has been difficult for Winchester to politically, socially, and culturally sustain a two-way flow of core-periphery relations which were capable of including places like Sewanee, Sherwood, or Keith-Springs mountain. Locally, then, in political and social terms we find a disturbing tension between "the Mountain" (=Sewanee) and "the valley" (=Winchester) which compromises the core-periphery relationship.
Despite economic magnets such as restaurants and retail outlets such as Wal-Mart, Winchester has found few satisfying symbolic ways to integrate a major section of its natural periphery into a positive relationship that would support true core/periphery relations. Sewanee, on the other hand, has powerful symbolic resources available to it to allow it to function as the core institution of a very large regional area which functions as the dependent periphery of the university. The result is that more people attend ritually centering events in Sewanee from outside the county than people from Sewanee attend centering events in Winchester.
Healthy communities, large or small, are centered and find ways of ritually and symbolically expressing their full communal identity by their capacity to recognize and include their surrounding periphery into the life of the core zone and its institutions. Parties, festivals, parades, and other events are the familiar ways communities integrate their periphery dependencies into the life of the core.