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Life in what was once the 'Little Black City of Diamonds'

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It’s a Tuesday at 10:30am, and the busiest place in Nelsonville might be the Speedway gas station.

The BP and Shell stations are closed. Permanently. Though a few people in t-shirts and loose jeans still gather outside the latter chatting by an empty pump. Route 33 used to run through Nelsonville until the state built a bypass to shorten travel times between the university town of Athens and Columbus. The re-route has been a boon for commuters but added to Nelsonville’s woes.

The town’s former big employer, a boot manufacturing company called Rocky, moved to Puerto Rico in the late 1980sleaving behind its corporate headquarters and an outdoor gear outlet. Efforts to revive the town appear in patches. The old opera house has just undergone a massive restoration. It sits like a jewel at the southeast edge of a public square that holds a local handicrafts store, a pub and an art space. The city’s main push to bring life back to the place is as an arts district.

Not everyone is convinced.

“You've got to have industry to keep people here,” said the man who runs the barber shop around the corner. 

Without jobs, he says, there just isn't much to do in Nelsonville. Aside from drugs. 

America’s drug problem is pervasive. Every state is struggling to get a grip on addictions to opioids, heroin and worse. But Ohio has taken a sucker punch. And small, former industrial towns like Nelsonville are feeling it the hardest.

Without jobs, there isn’t much to keep young people in town, either. And that obscures any vision its current residents have of the future. The barber calls Nelsonville depressed.

Some residents say those who do stay don’t want to work anyway. Older folks complain that youth lack work ethic and respect. As the barber and I chat, grown men ride up and down the street on bicycles slightly too small for their frames.

Ohio Governor John Kasich recently suggested that immigrants could fill the hole being left by those who are leaving the state. “I want them to come to Ohio. Send them here. We want them. Our population is not growing,” he told reporters at a gathering on September 26.

Extractive industries such as coal and clay built this “classic Appalachian town,” as the city’s website refers to Nelsonville. The booming coal industry eventually earned it the nickname the "Little City of Black Diamonds,” the website says.

The main employers now include a technical college and vocational school, a health center, an education resource-management company and a few correctional facilities that offer programs on substance abuse.

The city, like most here in Ohio, is trying to get a grip on its drug epidemic. But jobs are a big part of that battle, and education and recovery programs. The problems are clear, how Nelsonville and others go about turning their cities around is what I’m out to discover.