I want to visit Ligonier, Indiana. It’s not because it was once the world’s largest producer of marshmallows. It’s also not because I’m not sure how to pronounce it properly. Is it Lee-GOWN-yay, as an east coast Francophile like myself might think? Or is it Li-GON-ee-er? Perhaps LEE-gon-ear? I don’t know.
Actually, the real reason I want to visit Ligonier has nothing to do with pronunciation. It’s because Ligonier is a unique and highly diverse community in the otherwise largely homogeneous rural midwest. I call small communities like Ligonier that are substantially more diverse than their surroundings islands of diversity. When I use this term I’m specifically talking about small communities, not cities, which tend to be relatively diverse no matter what part of the country they are in. Islands of diversity are the small red dots in the vast sea of pale yellow on diversity maps like this one:
Ligonier is far from the only island of diversity in the rural midwest. There are other small midwestern towns, like Crete, Nebraska, that are similarly diverse. There are even a handful, like Storm Lake, Iowa, that are more diverse. If you scroll around this interactive map of diversity in the United States, you’ll see these places and more like them scattered across the landscape.
But even among these islands of diversity, Ligonier is different in at least two ways. First, Ligonier isn’t just more diverse than the areas around it–it is much more diverse. Indeed the difference between the diversity of Ligonier and the area around it is greater than that of anywhere else in the United States. In this sense Ligonier is the number one island of diversity in the entire country. Others are close, but Ligonier is the top of the table. Second, and somewhat curious given that it is the top island of diversity, Ligonier doesn’t have either of the two things that many of other leading islands of diversity do: a meat or poultry processing plant or a prison. It’s the only one of the United States’ top nine islands of diversity that have neither of these.
It’s a curious situation, and we’ll dig into it in the rest of this post. But first, how did I find Ligonier in the first place?
Finding Ligonier
Ligonier may not show up prominently on a standard map, but it’s not hard to find on a map of diversity. If you zoom in, bright islands of diversity like Ligonier show up. What is it about these places, I wondered. Is there something they have in common besides diversity? If so, is that thing the cause of the diversity, or an effect of it? I wanted to know what’s going on in these communities and if there is anything the rest of us can learn from them.
I started with data on the diversity of census tracts across the country. A census tract is typically home to a few thousand people, just about the right size for a small town. A town whose population is that of a census tract is just big enough–but also just small enough–to be a complete tight-knit community. Towns of this size support a variety of local businesses like Casa Macias and Grounded Coffee House. They also draw national chains like Walmart and McDonalds. Often there is a high school whose football or basketball team draws a local crowd.
I looked at the diversity of all of the more than eighty-six thousand census tracts in the United States. For each tract, I also computed the diversity of the the collection of tracts that are direct neighbors or neighbors of neighbors of the original tract. I then ranked every census tract by how much more diverse it is than the other tracts around it. Census tract 9722 in Noble County, Indiana came up at the top of the list. What’s in this particular tract? 4,904 people and my new favorite small town–Ligonier.
If we look at the diversity of tract 9722 and the tracts around it, we see that it really stands out. It is 73% diverse; that compares favorably with many tracts in large urban areas. But no other tract around it is more than 29% diverse. One of them comes in at a measly 6%. [Note: If you are interested in the details of how these numbers are computed, see the discussion here.]
If we combine all the neighboring tracts, we find that their overall diversity is only 16%. That’s 57 percentage points lower than tract 9722. No other tract in the country is more diverse than its neighboring tracts by a greater amount.
Other Diverse Islands
Although Ligonier tops the list with a 57 percentage point difference between its diversity and that of the tracts around it, there are others that are close. For example, Milan, Missouri, is in a census tract that is 64% diverse but is surrounded by a set of census tracts that are only 10% diverse for a difference of 54 percentage points. It looks like this:
Milan is also an island of diversity, but its setup is a little different than Ligonier. Instead of being almost the same size as the census tract that contains most of it, it is part of a census tract that is quire a bit geographically larger. The tract and the town look like this:
Among islands of diversity, some look like census tract 9722 and Ligonier, while others look like 4803 and Milan. But in both cases the majority of the population of the tract is within the town. And, more importantly to us, the tracts around them are much less diverse.
Industrial Agriculture
There is one other difference between 9722/Ligonier and 4803/Milan. 9722 has plants that manufacture automotive glass, recreational vehicles, and plastic containers. 4803 has industrial plants too, but in a very specific industry–meat processing. There are two large plants in the tract. One, Smithfield’s Farmland Foods, produces meat for humans. The other, Simmons Animal Nutrition, produces food for pets. This is part of a larger pattern. Among the top ten islands of diversity in the country, six have large commercial meat processing plants. As we continue further down the list through the top one hundred islands of diversity, we see small towns with large industrial meat plants over and over again.
Among the top ten islands of diversity, there are two Tyson plants in Storm Lake, Iowa, a Tyson plant and a Monogram plant in Dennison, Iowa, Iowa Premium in Tama, Iowa, JBS in Beardstown, Illinois, and Rose Acre Farms, an industrial egg producer outside Seymore, Indiana. These facilities have large numbers of low-wage jobs that attract a diverse set of employees, many of them recent immigrants. The pattern repeats itself across the rural midwest.
Oneida County, New York
What about the islands of diversity that don’t have large industrial agriculture plants? We find many of these in the rural parts of states better known for their large urban populations, particularly in New York and Pennsylvania. Of the top one hundred islands of diversity in the country, fifteen are in New York State and ten are in Pennsylvania. Iowa also has ten and Nebraska has eight. Illinois has nine, some of which look like the ones in Indiana, Iowa, and Nebraska that we just talked about, and others that look more like those in New York and Pennsylvania. All together, these five states–New York, Pennsylvania, Iowa, Illinois, and Nebraska, account for more than half (fifty-two) of the top one hundred islands of diversity in the country.
What do islands of diversity tend to look like in New York, Pennsylvania and parts of Illinois? Let’s look at an example, census tract 266, just outside the town of Marcy in Oneida County, New York. It is overall the number six island of diversity in the country. Here’s what it looks like compared to the tracts around it:
At first glance, it looks a lot like the other areas we have looked at. A small island of diversity, in this case fifty-two percentage points more diverse than the tracts around it. But it’s actually very different. First of all, tract 266 is not in or part of any town. It is near the towns of Oriskany, Marcy, and Whitesboro, but it isn’t part of any of them. It’s its own little tract of 2,152 residents as seen here:
There are also two small cities, Rome and Utica, nearby. Again, this makes things a bit different than most midwestern islands of diversity, which tend to be a bit more remote.
These differences aside, why are there 2,152 diverse residents in this small tract in an otherwise non-diverse part of upstate New York? The answer is simple. Census tract 266 isn’t a town, but rather the grounds of the New York State Department of Corrections Midstate Correctional Facility. The diverse population that lives there is not local. They are prisoners imported from other more diverse parts of the state.
The Rural Prison Industrial Complex
Tract 266 is not alone. The pattern of prisons as a source of diversity in rural areas repeats itself across upstate New York and Pennsylvania. In New York, five of the top six and seven of the top ten islands of diversity are prison tracts. In Pennsylvania, six of the top seven are prison tracts. This is a different pattern than we saw in the midwest. In Iowa, for example, there are no prisons in the top ten islands of diversity. In Nebraska there are none in the top eight in the state (there are only eight in the top one hundred nationwide). Illinois is a bit of a mix. Three of the top nine islands of diversity house prisons and three house industrial food plants.
Like rural industrial agriculture, rural prisons are a well-known phenomenon. In some states, aside from providing employment and economic support to the non-diverse regions where they are located, they provide rural communities with excess political power through prison gerrymandering. This is a modern-day version of the three fifths compromise, under which prisoners, who cannot vote and are legally enslaved under the exceptions clause of the 13th Amendment, are counted when political districts are apportioned. Under pressure from activists, New York and Pennsylvania both abolished prison gerrymandering in recent years. But other states continue the practice.
Back to Ligonier
As we have seen, many of the country’s top islands of diversity are either centers of industrial agriculture or prisons. But Ligonier is neither. Nevertheless, it sits at the very top of the list of islands of diversity. This makes it all the more intriguing. Why is it so diverse? How did it get that way and how long has it been that way?
I wish I could tell you the answer to these questions. But I’m not going to answer them sitting at my desk and searching the internet for tidbits on the history and people of this small town. The Chamber of Commerce has a web page with basic facts. The city has a web page that mentions that there was once a substantial Jewish population in town. The Indiana Historic Bureau has more details. I have also seen a report that unlike many of the islands of diversity around meat processing plants, which tend to be populated by recent immigrants, much of the Hispanic population has been in Ligonier for two or three generations, and originally came from the Mexican state of Aguascalientes. There is even a supermarket named after it.
How and why any of this history contributed to the diversity in the community today, I don’t know. But it’s all so fascinating. The best way to find out more is to visit. I would love to spend a couple of days there, talk to the people, and learn what makes the town tick. How is it that Ligonier became the United States’ top island of diversity? Is it a fluke, or was there thought and intention behind it? Are there any lessons for other communities large or small that would like to be more diverse than they are today? I have so much to learn.
But before I get to any of this, I promise that when I do eventually get to Ligonier the first thing I’ll do is ask someone to teach me the proper pronunciation.
