The Death of the All-American Town

Lancaster, Ohio, was once a thriving city of glass-makers, shoe factories, natural gas operations and more. By way of culture, it had a music festival, a county fair and the Sherman House (birthplace of the Civil War general). Cozily nestled just west of the Appalachian foothills, it had something in addition to its churches, parks, taverns and bowling alleys. Lancaster was a place where company executives lived within a few blocks of workers, where bankers and union reps belonged to the same lodge, where Anchor Hocking, the town’s biggest employer, backed up a semi loaded with frozen turkeys at Thanksgiving, and where, when its plant caught fire, residents chipped in to rebuild it.