HAD IT FOLLOWED a trajectory
But that isn't the Caroline County of today, thanks to the many good citizens who diverted it from misery to progress, and onto a path to contend for a 2009 All-America City Award.
The awards, given by the Denver-based National Civic League, honor jurisdictions that have improved people's lives through the joint efforts of government, private citizens, and nonprofit groups. Caroline is a previous finalist for the accolade, inaugurated by President Teddy Roosevelt and other reformers in the 1890s, and this June hopes to claim the top prize during a three-day competition in Tampa, Fla. The county, which has often struggled as its wealthier neighbors boomed, but never surrendered its pride or community spirit, is the only jurisdiction in Virginia to vie for the NCL prize.
Caroline has submitted three projects for the league's consideration. Each is a salutary achievement.
The Dawn Rehabilitation Project. Dawn is a mostly African-American hamlet of about 400 homes long plagued by failing sewer systems and unhealthy water--some samples contained animal and human feces--obtained from shallow wells or even hand-dug pits. The county government, church leaders, and others went to work, gaining these habitually neglected citizens' confidence and securing state and federal grants.
Besides making sewer and water improvements through innovative, decentralized technology, the program rehabbed crumbling homes and, in the words of the county's report, gave "[t]he elderly, many in their 70s and 80s, a new lease on life." Lifted from a rural sump, Dawn citizens are landscaping and putting out gardens in a new day of hope and pride.
The Caroline Library Project. The county took part in the regional library system, but in 1979 a group of county residents asked permission to start a Caroline-centered library. What started out as a roomful of books now encompasses four branches plus a bookmobile to serve the county's most remote communities. The branches contain more than 64,950 volumes with an annual circulation of almost a quarter-million. The report attributes this to "the cooperative efforts of the Board of Supervisors, community-wide fundraising drives, networking, and support within the local business community."
Community centers
Nor are Caroline's libraries just places to check out books. They've become community centers where residents can cooperatively search for better jobs, earn GEDs, enjoy the arts, learn to quilt and cook, and much more--all this, mind you, in scarcely more than a generation. The libraries are small monuments to the wonder of community, in this case one of around 28,000 souls.
The Caroline Dental Program. At the turn of this century, only six dentists practiced in Caroline, and none took Medicaid. Somewhere along the way for the county's poorest residents, endurance became the child of reality: Many adults told their children that baby teeth were supposed to rot, and that the growth of permanent teeth would solve their dental woes--including, often, excruciating pain that made classroom concentration difficult. Primary school nurses found pupils' mouths "black from decay, often down to the gum line."
The county's Social Services director, Cynthia Green, responded to this sad affair by convening school nurses and other school officials, the state Department of Health, and the county administrator to launch a program to help those without dental insurance.
Simple clinics opened; a fluoride-rinsing program began; school buses hauled kids for checkups and treatment. The whole complex of physical-psychological-educational problems linked to serious childhood dental pathology is now becoming a thing of the past as not only smiles, but lives too, are brighter.
Whether on not Caroline County wins a league award, it can stand tall as a truly all-American community, and as an exemplar to its neighbors, who may be richer--or, all things weighed, may not be.