Small town tries to keep the feeling

At a time when most Palouse towns are searching for an economic spark, Rockford’s enviable challenge is catching lightning in a bottle.

Roughly 10,000 cars pass through the town center daily, bound for the gambling, boat docks and golf courses around Lake Coeur d’Alene just a few miles away. With increasing frequency some of those motorists like what’s outside their windshield as they pass through this southeast Spokane County farm town.

There’s talk of a 42-house subdivision – no small matter for a town with fewer than 200 homes. Parking spots are suddenly scarce on First Street, the main drag for the town of 500. Noon on Thursday at Fredneck’s bar and grill looks like a hot Friday night used to. And there’s actually a wait for seating at the Harvest Moon Café, which locals couldn’t fill two years ago.

“We’ve gone from 2,500 cars a day to somewhere around 10,000 cars,” said Gary Wagner, Rockford mayor. “That’s casino drivers, lake drivers. Our traffic has quadrupled in the last couple years.”

It’s been years since Rockford’s downtown exhibited so much bustle, said Larry Gady, who dined at the Harvest Moon on Thursday. He pointed to the packed tables to prove his point.

“I don’t know a single person in here, and I’ve lived in Rockford since 1961,” the farmer said. In a small town, that kind of occurrence happens as infrequently as a lunar eclipse.

The feeling from City Hall to the town fairgrounds is that there’s more to come. But there’s also a concern that if Rockford doesn’t play its cards well, it won’t be doing much more than looking both ways before crossing the street.

Rockford is not a destination like the Coeur d’Alene Casino 10 minutes down the highway, Wagner said, and it’s not a Wal-Mart community-in-

waiting, either. It’s a quaint farm town with a huge Norman Rockwell upside.

There’s little to no cellular phone service here. Reception tends to cut out at the town limits, right where motorists turn east into Rockford off State Highway 27. In three blocks, the city’s core features 100-year-old two-story brick buildings with a couple apartments upstairs and street-level businesses. It is small town simple, and its goal is to stay small town.

“They have a lot of traffic coming through the community, and I think they’d like to take advantage of that,” said Bill Grimes, whose private planning firm, Studio Cascade, helped Rockford develop a blueprint for its future. “But in the long term, I think Rockford is trying to define what it is rather than be defined by what’s driving through it.”

Earlier this year, Rockford’s plans for its main street, as well as the town’s development regulations, won an award from the American Planning Association and the group’s Washington counterpart for its “small town planning.”

The most catching detail about Rockford’s plan might be the level of volunteerism required to make it work. Volunteers are called upon to make park improvements, to provide downtown art that incorporates elements of Rockford’s farm heritage. In other communities, city planning is something residents see happening around them but pretty much without their input, Grimes said. In Rockford’s plan, little happens if no one pitches in.

Restaurant owner Nancy Swanson is ready to do whatever it takes to move Rockford forward, with or without the city government.

“We’ve just got to do it and by golly if we have to beg for forgiveness then we will,” said Swanson, who owns the Harvest Moon with her husband, Craig.

Last summer volunteers launched Thursday night movies in the park, which drew 103 people on its best night, Craig Swanson said. The community’s next big step will be a park-based flea market. Those types of events might not pull commuters off First Street, but they make Rockford the kind of tight-knit community for which some people grow nostalgic.

Less than two years ago, the Swansons were in one of those cars driving through Rockford en route from point A to point B. They lived in Portland and vacationed at a cabin on Lake Chatcolet just south of Lake Coeur d’Alene. They stopped at the Harvest Moon, fell in love with Rockford and offered to buy the restaurant.

They became converts of the small-town way. A retired Internal Revenue Service employee, Nancy opens the Harvest Moon early for breakfast and plays host to a group of farmers whom she challenges to roll the dice to see who pays for coffee. When she found out Larry Gady had a thing for ground beef steaks smothered with grilled onions and mushrooms, she not only added it to the menu, she named it the Larry Gady Love Patty Hamburger Steak.

She knew moving to Rockford was the right choice after the death of her father-in-law. Merle “Red” Swanson had lived in Rockford less than six months, but the community filled the Rockford United Methodist Church for his funeral.

That sense of community also compelled developers Tim Villard and Steve Swanson to plan a 42-lot subdivision just east of downtown. Steve Swanson, no relation to the owners of the Harvest Moon, sited Rockford Estates after weighing the community’s distance to Lake Coeur d’Alene as well its closeness to downtown Spokane, less than 30 miles away.

“You sit on that piece of property and look at the view and it’s quite fantastic,” Steve Swanson said. “I never thought I’d like looking over the Palouse, but the Palouse is beautiful. Also, everyone is headed in the opposite direction from where you are.”

Or at least, they’re only passing through.