Let Us Build Us a City: Eleven Lost Towns

Ah, this book was a delight. A couple of relatives of mine are in the 'Cherokee City' section. They are no longer with us, so it was good to see their stories in print. I've read this book twice. During my second pass through it, I actually re-created the trip around Arkansas, and was able to find most of the buildings that were pictured in the book. They have aged a lot in the last 20+ years, as have we all. Please, reader, pick this book up and read it. You will not regret it.

Award-winning author Donald Harington originally published Let Us Build Us a City in 1986; now in a beautiful new edition, this thoughtful collection of stories about eleven forgotten small towns in Arkansas remains a pristine glimpse into history. Some of the forgotten towns gradually dwindled and declined to little more than a church, a post office, a general store, a gas station, and a handful of residents; other overlooked towns were never terribly memorable to begin with. Donald Harington learned of these towns' stories through his connection with a researcher named Kim, and eventually Harrington and Kim fell in love. Let Us Build a City is a contemplative look at the joy and wonder to be discovered in hidden Arkansas history, and as enjoyable to read today as it was over twenty years ago.

An extremely interesting synopsis of the birth, life, and death of eleven Arkansas communities at one time aspiring to own the coveted label of "city," this book is all the more interesting if you have had the chance to have travelled through several of these mere wide spots in the road on occasion. While the author's incessant tangents seem to be the product of a deep seated need for a vehicle with which to exhibit his wealth of worldly knowledge, this annoyance aside, his ability to raise common people to the rank of folk heroes, if only on a local scale, is indeed unsurpassed.

It gives me faith in the publishing industry to find this wonderful book still in print. Donald Harington was an established Arkansas novelist when a reader named Kim wrote him out of the blue expressing the inspiration she drew from one of his stories. Harington was lecturing out of state at the time but he responded with encouragement for a project looking into the history of Arkansas places that had "City" in the name and were anything but. So, Kim took off, doing the leg work and dispatching her findings to Harington who eventually shaped them into this symphony of historical fact and human tragedies and comedies. As soon has he was able, he caught up with Kim and the two became instant soul mates. Their own story is woven into this unique blend of fact and imaginative invocation of original intentions and relinquished dreams. A pleasure to read, it sparks curiosity about the cities that never grew up in your own state (the author includes a state by state list) and a desire to go learn their stories. This is a unique story, very human, very American.

In this odd mix of travelogue, Americana, love story and history, Donald Harington shows us not just lost cities and lost people and places, but what he calls "lost places in the heart, of vanished life in the hidden places of the soul". And the beautiful thing, the redemption, is that these places aren't lost. In Harington's elegant prose they live on, and will live on as long as this book is read. It deserves to be read in every American history class in the country, because in this book his remembrances and his curiosity open new worlds, just next to and behind this one. Towards the end, when he includes a poem by Richard Hugo, it's as if he's bottled something inside you that you felt but didn't know. A tremendous achievement of remembrance.