Now that the hustle and bustle of Christmas and New Year’s celebrations has come to an end, or, perhaps more accurately, the long holiday season going back to Halloween is over, we suddenly find ourselves in a bit of a lull to start 2023.
As is the case every year, January is a fairly quiet month. That’s especially true for a town like Hermann. Activity ebbs and flows with the seasons, dictated largely by the festivals that draw tourists, and money, to cities like this one that rely on tourism as their primary industry.
Businesses close up shop for a month or two, traffic downtown mercifully relents, and, at least for a short while, Hermann transforms into something closer to any of the other small towns dotting the Missouri countryside.
As Hermann is still a town with a sense of community and not a resort entirely reliant upon tourism, the “offseason” doesn’t grind things to a complete standstill as it does in other places.
The various cities that comprise the Lake of the Ozarks, for example, have virtually nothing open for the people that actually live there during their slow season. Most everything caters exclusively to the tourist rush that starts with Spring Break and runs through Labor Day.
But the Lake is wholly contrived, intended since its creation to be less of a place to have a home and more of a place to have a second house.
Hermann, fortunately, is not.
There is a long history here, and her citizens have and continue to persevere through all manner of hardships from the initial founding, to Prohibition, to the current population decline.
Debate the merits of becoming a tourism-centric town as much as you like, but whatever industry has primarily fueled Hermann over the years the citizens have more or less retained the same sense of community it took a bunch of German immigrants adopting to get this place up and running in the first place.
However, the decline in population presents the biggest threat to the town as it has stood for nearly 200 years, considering a town can’t exist if no one lives there, and will need to be addressed if Hermann is to avoid emptying out and becoming a seasonal resort like the Lake of the Ozarks.
It won’t happen overnight, but something clearly needs to be done to reverse the trend. Civic organizations and businesses that serve the citizens require there to actually be enough people living here to support them.
These things are what make communities strong, and caution should be taken to avoid losing them.
Else the quiet of January could become all the quieter
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