Four miles southeast of the village of Matfield Green in Chase County, Kansasthe heart of the Flint Hillslies the abandoned settlement of Thurman. At the turn of the century Thurman was a prosperous farming and ranching settlement with fifty-one households, a post office, two general stores, a blacksmith shop, five schools, and a church. Today, only the ruins of Thurman remain. Joseph Hickey uses Thurman to explore the settlement form of social organization, whichalong with the village, hamlet, and small townwas a dominant feature of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American life. He traces Thurman's birth in 1874, its shallow rises and falls, and its demise in 1944. Akin to what William Least Heat-Moon did for Chase County in PrairyErth, Hicky provides a "deep map" for one post-office community and, consequently, tells us a great deal about America's rural past. Hickey's account of Thurman's social organization and disintegration provides a new perspective on what happened when the cattle drives from Texas and the Southwest shifted in the 1880s from the Kansas cowtowns to the Flint Hills. Moreover, he punctures numerous myths about the Flint Hills, including those that cattle dominated because the land is too rocky to farm or that Indians refused to farm because of traditional beliefs. Like many other small rural communities, Hickey argues, Thurman during its seventy-year history was actually several different settlements. A product of changing social conditions, each one resulted from shifting memberships and boundaries that reflected the efforts of local entrepreneurs to use country schools, churches, and other forms of "social capital" to gain advantages over their competitors. In the end, Thurman succumbed to the impact of agribusiness, which had the effect of transforming social capital from an asset into a liability. Ultimately, Hickey shows, the settlement's fate echoed the decline of rural community throughout America.--Amazon.com.

Foreword, by William Least Heat-Moon -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- 1. The common currency of common folks -- 2. Transitory myths and eduring monuments -- 3. Goers and stayers : Thurman's social antecedents -- 4. An unimportant Post Office settlement -- 5. Steers ate people : Thurman and the Great Western cattle boom -- 6. The Strong-Gould feud and High Prairie -- Upland farmers and their hardscrabble fortunes -- The Golden Years : cattle barons and country folks -- 9. Reviving settlements and saving souls -- 10. Waste and solitary places : Thurman becomes Matfield Green.