Wednesday, May. 05, 2010
A tiny town in decay: Can Fairmead be revived?
By Chris Collins / The Fresno Bee
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ReprintFAIRMEAD -- No one seems to know why this tiny town is dying.
A poor water system? A closed-down off-ramp? A changing population?
Whatever the reason, the bumpy dirt roads, boarded-up homes and overgrown grass medians scattered throughout Fairmead are evidence of a town in decay.
But a diverse group of current and former residents -- and a handful of local academics and students -- want to revive this rural community. They are lobbying for grants, hosting town halls, raising money and trying to get the attention of county officials.
Madera County planners are pushing for improvements, too: They consider Fairmead, an unincorporated town of about 700 residents, to be the county's top revitalization project.
But change won't come easily.
Fairmead, about four miles south of Chowchilla, doesn't have a single business in town. Even if someone wanted to open one, they couldn't -- the aging well-water system wouldn't support it.
For decades, in fact, the water system has constantly been on the blink, sometimes shutting down for days at a time and forcing the county to haul in bottled water and portable toilets. The water pressure is so low that Fairmead Elementary School doesn't bother to water its grass during the summer.
And there isn't much of a sewage system. Each home has a septic tank -- or a hole in the ground.
The outskirts of town are dotted with a handful of well-maintained ranchettes adjacent to cow pastures and horse ranches, but most streets are lined with dilapidated houses, trailers and mobile homes. A survey conducted by the county two years ago found that 12% of homes were vacant, half the homes were occupied by renters, and that 90% of residents were low-income.
Fairmead has no sidewalks -- and driving through town is a bad idea if you're not in a truck: Many of the roads are nothing more than gravel and dirt.
"It just seems like a lost little area," said Terry Barnes, the elementary school's principal. "I mean, people live here, but the services for them are few and far between."
It wasn't always this way.
The town was founded in 1912 as a farming colony and was home to about 1,500 residents, most from African-American families. It soon expanded -- a pool room, cigar stand, two blacksmith shops, an insurance company and four grocery stores all popped up. It also had a 30-room inn, a lumber company and a cheese factory.
But in 1930, Highway 99, which ran through the town, was rerouted to the west side of the Southern Pacific railroad tracks, making the town more isolated. By the 1970s, most of the businesses had disappeared, though Fairmead still had a soul-food restaurant called Chick's Retreat and two small markets.
On a recent afternoon, Freddy Gaines, 50, pointed to a large lot overgrown with weeds across the street from his mobile home. That's where one of the markets once stood, he said.
The town's demographics have changed, as well. In the 1970s, it was still mostly a black community. Now it is mostly Hispanic.
In July 2007, the town's last business -- the Mammoth Orange drive-in, a local landmark next to Highway 99 -- closed down. Caltrans, which was closing ramps that didn't meet modern highway standards, fenced off the ramp that led to the juice and hamburger stand, and also directly into town.
Once the ramp closed, Fairmead residents felt "like the highway doesn't exist anymore," Gaines said.
A new $51 million interchange that opened one mile south in July 2009 is surrounded by dirt and fields, but county officials hope that one day there will be a gas station or fast-food joint that will provide jobs for Fairmead residents.
The interchange also leads to the Fossil Discovery Center, which is scheduled to open this summer. The county hopes that the museum's ancient mammoth bones will attract tourists who might also take a side trip through century-old Fairmead.
Visitors will see parts of the town's history, including 20-foot-wide medians that are dotted with sky-high palm trees and used to be the pride of Fairmead. For now, those medians are overrun with weeds and littered with trash and beer cans.
