Small-town charm is now so rare in the Triangle, it has become a commodity.

Chambers of commerce use it in their marketing slogans, such as Wendell’s “Small Town Charm -- Capital City Connection.”

Some in Hillsborough have given it a name -- “smalltownliness” -- and they’re trying to sell the experience to tourists through a Web site, smallwander.com.

And the booming suburb of Morrisville aims to create an old-time Main Street feel where none ever existed.

As Triangle towns mesh into a single metropolitan area, no longer isolated from one another by forests and farmland, folks are striving to protect or recapture the small-town lifestyle.

“There are a lot of people in our transient society who really crave that,” said Morrisville planning director Ben Hitchings. “ really want to connect with a community.”

The Triangle has prospered in the decades since the development of Research Triangle Park and Interstate 40. And with plenty of inexpensive land at its rural edges, subdivisions have sprawled, with strip malls and plenty of parking to support commuters on the move. But all of this progress has come at a cost: Some residents say their towns have lost their souls, namely their once-vibrant downtowns where they ran into friends and neighbors just walking to school or running daily errands.

“It’s the sprawl that’s killing the inner town,” said Nancy Baker of the Walkable Hillsborough Coalition, which aims to reverse this trend. “Our children are growing up in places where they pass each other in cars.”

Allen Baddour, a superior court judge in Chatham and Orange counties, volunteers on a land-use planning committee in Pittsboro, where he has lived for the past 11 years. Baddour said governments have helped to diminish small-town life by moving services such as post offices and libraries out of town centers.

“You’re less likely to combine that trip with shopping or dining, and all of a sudden you’ve created a car culture,” he said. “When you insulate yourself inside your car ... you don’t have those social interactions, and that tears at the fabric of a small-town community.”

The car-culture dilemma

Even people who decide to walk have trouble fitting into the car culture, said Tom Campanella, a city and regional planning professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and member of the Hillsborough Planning Board. Drivers want wider roads to thin traffic and big parking lots for convenient shopping, while pedestrians need narrower roads, sidewalks and intimate spaces to feel safe walking and crossing streets, Campanella said. Twentieth-century suburban development, he said, is out of scale with the human body.

“You feel like a mouse on the face of the moon,” he said.

Hence, a walkable streetscape, where one can find it, commands attention.

In the western Triangle, Pittsboro and Hillsborough attract their share of downtown foot traffic with their historic architecture, restaurants and arts attractions such as the General Store Cafe and the Blue Bayou Club.

“Part of the reason want to come here is because of this circle and what’s around here,” said Baddour, sitting in the General Store Cafe and pointing toward the roundabout that carries U.S. 15-501 around Pittsboro’s historic courthouse.

Pittsboro has its antique dealers and art galleries, Hillsborough its colonial architecture and American Indian heritage. But both hearken to a time before a one-size-fits-all suburbia.

Next page >