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I have a wealthy cousin who apparently tried to create a small town. I have no idea what he was thinking but it failed.

Towns in America tend to be organic in the sense that they sprang up where they were convenient. Railroads and water were major factors. The town where I grew up sprang up at the crossing of two railroads. Before long a grain mill sprang up along with a market, hardware etc. The town where I live now had a railroad and a river that was dammed to power a mill. My house sits on the site where the icehouse was when they cut ice out of the lake.
14 posted on 12/31/2013 6:25:09 PM PST by cripplecreek
Years ago Thomas Sowell’s annual list of recommended books included a trilogy by Daniel Boorstin entitled, “The Americans.” The first book was subtitled, “The Colonial Experience;” the second book was subtitled, The National Experience, and the last was subtitled “The Democratic Experience.”
I read all three from cover to cover, tho I didn’t initially find the last one - on the Twentieth Century - as appealing as the first two, which were most excellent.
I mention them because the second book of the trilogy, which I have provided an Amazon link to, discusses the topic of the development of the American West. The point I took away from it on the topic at hand was that people heading west were looking for the place to stake a claim which would appreciate rapidly in value, so they could settle up on their claim after 3 years, and have the option of “flipping,” as we now would call it, and moving on to repeat the process. But of course, the great problem one faced in doing that was to decide which of thousands of places on the map were not merely places on the map but places where commerce would develop and make your claim valuable.
Sitting at our computers in 2014, we have the bias that we can know that “of course” Chicago would grow into the biggest metropolis in the midwest, and “of course” St. Louis, Milwaukee, and any number of other places would become lesser large cities. And “of course” names on the map that we never heard of, either became backwaters or - as in the case of the “wealthy cousin” you mentioned - failed outright, or never actually were anything more than names on the map.

When your wealthy cousin undertook to develop a town, he did the things you saw, with bulldozers and construction contractors. But he also tried to convince other people of the correctness of his vision, and tried to get them to buy into the idea of “getting in on the ground floor.” Not enough of them bought - but that is hindsight. Your cousin was “the man who is actually in the arena,” as Theodore Roosevelt famously put it:

From Theodore Roosevelt's 1910 speech at the Sarbonne:
There is no more unhealthy being, no man less worthy of respect, than he who either really holds, or feigns to hold, an attitude of sneering disbelief toward all that is great and lofty, whether in achievement or in that noble effort which, even if it fails, comes to second achievement. A cynical habit of thought and speech, a readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with life's realities - all these are marks, not as the possessor would fain to think, of superiority but of weakness. They mark the men unfit to bear their part painfully in the stern strife of living, who seek, in the affection of contempt for the achievements of others, to hide from others and from themselves in their own weakness. The rôle is easy; there is none easier, save only the rôle of the man who sneers alike at both criticism and performance.
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

According to Boorstin, the way you wanted to operate when promoting a boom town was to first recruit two businesses to it:

a newspaper printer, and

a hotel proprietor.
Once you had a newspaper printer settled in your community, you had a propaganda organ which would promote your town - for the simple reason that the printer who settled there wanted his decision to locate there to be validated by having his newspaper be in a growing community. Printers were known to announce occurrences in their papers which had never actually gone through the formality of having actually taken place. After you had a newspaper and a hotel, and were on your way, the next thing you tried to promote in your town was the founding of a college. Again, at each step of the development those who had already “bought in” were on your side, all wanting the town to grow so that their own property values would appreciate.
As I said, the book is well worth a read. Lots of interesting stuff.