When Mick Harold woke up on November 9, 2016 to the news that Donald Trump had been elected president of the United States, he punched the air in silent celebration.

“I had a good wager on Trump, a couple of hundred pounds at 8-to-1 odds,” says the 55-year-old politician from Stoke-on-Trent. His city is nicknamed Britain’s “Brexit capital,” as nearly 70 percent of residents who participated in the June 2016 European Union (EU) referendum voted for Britain to leave the bloc. “It’s hard to stand out from a crowd when they’re all baying at you. It takes bottle to knock the establishment. Trump and Farage have it, and people responded.”

Harold, who chairs the anti-immigration UK Independence Party (UKIP) in Stoke Central, credits long-time party leader Nigel Farage with helping Donald Trump press his case to the American people. In the days just after U.S. election, while much of the world was still absorbing the shock, Trump rewarded Farage for his loyalty. Invited to Trump Tower, the UKIP founder was the first foreign politician to meet the president-elect. The former commodities trader could hardly contain himself, gleefully tweeting a photo of the occasion: both men, puffed up and beaming, are standing shoulder-to-shoulder before a set of gilded doors. Later, Farage, 

barnstorming before the Conservative Political Action Conference

, would claim Trump’s victory and Brexit as “the beginning of a great global revolution.”

Like Trump, Farage, who spearheaded the campaign to take Britain out of the EU, has championed his own home-grown populist revolt. He has called on voters to buck “global corporatism,” uncontrolled immigration, and the neoliberal ruling elite. And while the blustering right-winger is hardly a popular politician in Britain — he has lost seven elections to become a member of Parliament — like Trump, he has successfully tapped into portion of the voting public that feels a growing sense of alienation from the political class.

Most Britons do not like Donald Trump. Poll numbers are clear: 70 percent say they have an unfavorable opinion of the new president, with 56 percent holding a very unfavorable view, 

. As in the United States, anger over Trump’s election quickly spilled into the streets. On the first day of his presidency, in the cold mist of a January morning in London, banners were unfurled from bridges across the capital. “Build Bridges, Not Walls,” read one draped from the city’s landmark Tower Bridge. Another banner outside Parliament declared “Migrants welcome here.” The message was evident: Trump’s threats about immigration had no support in Britain.

Nearly two million people have signed a petition to stop the new president from making a state visit.

That weekend, in solidarity with the Women’s March in the United States, some 100,000 anti-Trump protestors thronged London’s streets. Since then, 

nearly two million people have signed a petition to stop the new president from making a state visit

 to the United Kingdom. Prime Minster Theresa May’s government, which is eagerly seeking a post-Brexit trade deal with the United States, is adamant that President Trump will come to England. Indeed, plans are afoot for the visit to take place in October, when Parliament is not in session — thereby avoiding the spectacle of an address before protesting MPs. Anti-Trump activists in Britain also have plans of their own. In a statement, the 

 promised: “The opposition to this state visit, and to Trump’s policies, is growing every day. Whether he comes in spring or autumn, or to London, Birmingham or Scotland, we will meet him in huge numbers to say that the politics of hate and prejudice are not welcome here.”

But Britain, like the United States, is a deeply divided nation.

To get a sense of England’s political schism, go to Stoke-on-Trent, which sits between Manchester and Birmingham in the country’s hard-pressed north. The shadow of its lost industrial past hangs over this small-scale city, where boarded buildings and abandoned factories dot the urban landscape. Haunted by the decline of its manufacturing core, including the once-famous pottery industry — at the peak of its productivity, local workers kiln-fired millions of colorful plates, tiles, and bowls to sell in fine ceramic shops around the world — Stoke is now a hotbed of working-class disaffection.

“There’s a portion of the population who feel they have no voice, who feel alienated from politics, and feel their views are being excluded from the political agenda,” says Mick Temple, a professor of journalism and politics at Staffordshire University in Stoke.

In February, Stoke voters went to the polls to fill a vacant parliamentary seat, 

a by-election hyped as a moment of truth for UKIP and Britain’s left-leaning Labour Party, alike

. The Conservative party, which holds a majority in government, had only a minor role in the political calculus here. Stoke-on-Trent has been a Labour stronghold since the constituency was created in 1950, and a loss here would have shaken a party already suffering nationally from historically poor polling figures. A win by UKIP, which hoped to capitalize on its support for last year’s Brexit referendum, would have given the small party a second member of Parliament.

On the day of the crunch election, gale-force winds and driving rains battered northern England. Voter turnout was discouragingly low, 

and the Labour candidate squeaked into office with 37 percent of the vote

. The UKIP candidate, the party’s current leader, Paul Nuttall, dogged by controversy and perceived as an outsider, managed to increase UKIP’s vote count from its standing in the 2015 general election, but still failed to win the day.

“We should have had a local candidate. There was a general concern and resentment that Paul was parachuted in to run for parliament,” says Tariq Mahmood, a barrister, practicing Muslim and the son of Pakistani immigrants — an unusual pedigree for a UKIP activist.

Mahmood had left the Labour Party to run as UKIP’s Stoke-on-Trent South parliamentary candidate in 2015. He denied that UKIP’s road to parliament looks rockier than ever, noting that in 2017, his party had cut further into Labour’s vote share, which had dwindled by half.

Temple sees UKIP’s blunt, often simplistic message as the kind of populist rhetoric that is winning over working-class communities.

“It was Paul Nuttall’s to lose,” counters Mick Temple of Staffordshire University, arguing that the UKIP candidate’s message to the working class was diluted by a series of “lies, fabrications, and fantasy” peddled in weeks of intense campaigning. But Temple sees UKIP’s blunt, often simplistic message as the kind of populist rhetoric that is winning over working-class communities. “Industry here — steel, coal, and potteries — was decimated in the 1980s,” he adds, noting that Stoke is still plagued by poor job prospects, low pay, and government budget cuts that have squeezed social services like health and education. 

 shows that 6.2 percent of adults in Stoke Central claim unemployment benefits, almost double the national average of 3.8 percent.

“It’s a similar core audience as Trump’s,” Temple says. “In America, it’s disaffected Republicans and a white working class that was previously largely apathetic about politics. Here,t’s former Labour voters who are driven by resentment towards the traditional elites and the parties in power.”

In the North Staffordshire YMCA, the community café is buzzing. It’s the first Friday of the month and the center offers locals a free meal and a chance to mingle. Danny Flynn, the local YMCA’s chief executive officer, bobs from table to table in the crowded hall. Flynn started his working life at 16 as an apprentice diesel-fitter not far from Stoke. Now 52, he still carries that experience with him, falling into easy conversation with factory workers, unemployed laborers, and teenage runaways. He’s clued in to this working-class area in a way that many politicians would envy.

“The pottery industry in Stoke-on-Trent in the 1988 employed 60,000 people. Now 6,000 work in the industry. That’s a 90 percent attrition rate,” says Flynn. Traditionally, he argues, working people would not hesitate to back Labour, but have increasingly turned to rightist populism for solutions.

“Labour supporters under [Party leader Jeremy] Corbyn are seen as fiercely ideological, and part of the educated, London elite that doesn’t speak for working-class communities,” Flynn says. “It’s a portion of the population that feels that for years and years, the government, the parties, and the institutions have abandoned them.”

Despite the derelict mills and boarded storefronts, there are sparks of hope in Stoke. Staffordshire University has a student body of 15,000, and what’s left of the city’s potteries has seen a small resurgence, with manufacturers like Emma Bridgewater even thriving. Ironically, in a city that voted by 66 percent to leave the EU, an end to tariff-free access to the single market may hit hard. And there is also the 

worry that the Stoke and Staffordshire region is set to lose £157 million

 in EU-allocated regeneration funding in the wake of last year’s referendum.

If there is a single issue that divides Britain, it is Brexit. The big cities in Britain chose one future; the rest of the country, another. That rupture closely echoes the results of the U.S. presidential election: a gulf between cities that are disproportionally made up of the young, educated, and multicultural, versus non-urban communities that are aging and largely white, and have a workforce that has been left behind by a changing economy.

In Britain, immigration has become the biggest scapegoat for all the country’s challenges.

In Britain, immigration has become the biggest scapegoat for all the country’s challenges. Brexit voters ranked immigration at the top of their list of concerns. “Take back control of our borders” was the chant, and those views have had an outsized impact on British politics. Echoing Trump’s incendiary campaign rhetoric about walling off Mexico, Farage set off a firestorm in the closing weeks of the Brexit campaign when he 

unveiled a billboard showing a desperate line of mostly non-white refugees trying to reach Europe

 under the tagline “Breaking Point: The EU Has Failed Us All.”

The county of Essex, just north of London on England’s eastern seacoast, facing mainland Europe, is UKIP’s heartland. The party’s only current MP, Douglas Carswell, won a parliamentary seat here. 

Every district in the county voted to leave the EU, with 62 percent overall opting for Brexit

. And while only 3 percent of the population of Essex is registered as immigrants, the general view here is that uncontrolled immigration is at the root of Britain’s troubles.

“The problem for us is that we see our way of life disappearing,” says Alan Bayley, one of six UKIP Essex County councillors. Bayley argues that social services, from the National Health Service to police protection, have been strained to the breaking point by an influx of economic migrants to Britain, mostly from Eastern Europe. His neighbors from Castle Point and nearby Canvey Island — the self-proclaimed “most British place in Britain” — are quick to agree, despite a local population that is 95 percent white British. UKIP has gained traction here, primarily because of its stand on immigration.

Canvey Island in south Essex is separated from the mainland by a network of creeks that feed into the Thames estuary. A once lush expanse of marsh is now marred by housing estates, shuttered oil refineries, and electric pylons that march across the flatlands. Nearby, in a busy shopping district that is more strip mall than town center, locals chat outside the Sunshine Launderette.

Len, who is 52, is happy to discuss immigration on both sides of the Atlantic. “We have to do something about immigration,” he says gruffly. “It’s the same in America. I’m not saying Trump should build his wall, but he’s got the right idea to hold the line on who is coming in.” His views reflect 

 that Trump’s migrant ban holds some appeal here, with 29 percent of British respondents backing it.

Chris, a 58-year-old grandmother, chimes in. “The wall is a load of rubbish. Trump’s a fake and all his talk is just playing to the crowds,” she says, but defends Farage as “honest.” Carswell, whose Clacton constituency is just up the coast, is viewed with suspicion. “I’m not convinced he really supports Brexit,” says 51-year-old Gary, a local builder.

In a small conference room in Portcullis House, a bulky Thames-side parliamentary office building distinguished by its rows of tall, stylized chimneys, Douglas Carswell bounces into the room. He’s late, running from a meeting with his publishers, and eager to discuss big ideas — the death of liberal politics and the rise of “alt-right” radicalism — ignoring the internecine squabbles in UKIP that have lately grabbed the eye of the British press. A Conservative Party defector who joined UKIP in 2014, he has been tagged a 

 by Farage, who demanded that he be expelled from UKIP for not talking tough on immigration. Adding fuel to that fire are reports that 

Carswell may have sabotaged Farage’s secret campaign for a knighthood.

“I’m much more interested in talking about your great republic than my career,” he says, struggling to relax into a straight-backed wooden chair.

Carswell is 46, with a long, oval face, jutting jaw, and lopsided grin. The son of two doctors, he lived in Uganda until his teens, when he was sent to Charterhouse, one of Britain’s oldest boarding schools. His view of the new American president is mixed. “I was bemused, somewhat confused, perplexed, but also slightly delighted at his election,” he says. But as the confusion of Trump’s first few weeks mount, along with an alarming number of bombshell Tweets, he wonders “if Trump’s critics were right after all.”

“Trump is no American Caesar about to cross some sort of Constitutional Rubicon,” he says.

A professed libertarian, Carswell argues that Trump’s election, like Brexit, was a phenomenon destined to occur. “The death of the center-left is a phenomenon that is happening throughout the Western world,” he says, arguing that a “technocratic, managerialist cadre of politicians” at the top of the leading parties in both Britain and the United States have “incubated the conditions that have allowed this alt-right, anti-politics, anti-establishment backlash” to occur.

On Brexit, Carswell insists that immigration was not the primary motivation, calling it “a shorthand” way of expressing a profound sense of lost control.

On Brexit, Carswell insists that immigration was not the primary motivation, calling it “a shorthand” way of expressing a profound sense of lost control. “If you deconstruct the objection to immigration, it’s not the number of foreigners in the country; it’s the fact that people can’t get into a [doctor’s office] to see a GP on a Saturday, which ends up the fault of a glutted health care system.”

Farage and a hefty number of UKIP supporters would likely disagree. Speaking to a radio station in Jackson, Mississippi in the months leading up to the U.S. election, Farage argued that immigration played a pivotal role in the Brexit campaign, a strategy he said that would help propel Trump into the White House. “Gradually,” Farage told listeners on SuperTalk FM, “people saw their way of life was changing, their quality of life deteriorating, and they kept being told by their leaders, ‘Oh, don’t worry about it, because our GDP is going up, so all immigration must be a good thing’…but who’s benefiting? It’s the big businesses getting cheap labor who are benefitting.”

Farage’s harsh rhetoric poisoned the debate on immigration, according to Staffordshire University’s Mick Temple, while the Labour Party “demonized” any legitimate worries that working-class voters may have had about the influx of economic migrants into Britain, quickly dismissing it as racism.

In the U.S. context, Nolan McCarty, a political scientist at Princeton, offers a similar argument. In an interview with 

 columnist Thomas B. Edsell, McCarty concludes, “The Democrats have played immigration badly… They... (have been) deaf to concerns that many voters have about the effects of immigration on wages and public services… The Democrats have to do better than dismiss all opposition to immigration as racism.”

If Britain’s Labour Party and the U.S. Democratic Party are to reconnect with the hearts and souls of their constituencies, they will need to try to understand, not shame, the swathe of voters in both countries who feel left out of the prosperity that has prevailed in many metropolitan centers. If the Left hopes to upend right-wing populism, it first needs to address the movement’s roots.

*On March 25, UKIP MP Douglas Carswell resigned from his party, declaring he would continue in Parliament as an independent. He said he left UKIP “amicably” and in the knowledge that “we won," referring to Brexit. UKIP grandees were furious at the the news. In late April, Prime Minister Teresa May called a national election. Carswell has since announced he will stand down in the June 8 election and vote Conservative.

is a London-based freelance writer who has worked as a staff reporter for Reuters and Dow Jones Newswires and written for a wide variety of newspapers and magazines.

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The anger and resentment that helped elect President Trump in the United States finds a mirror image in the heart of small-town Britain.

Trump Finds Support in Britain’s Brexit Capital

In late February 2014, when snow still blanketed the northern counties of New York State, a group of townspeople in a river-bend village near the Vermont border sat down to engineer a resurrection.

Like hundreds of small towns across America, 

, some 30 miles northeast of New York State’s capital Albany, has seen its once-booming manufacturing base head south or overseas and with it local jobs. The result has been a steady stream of young people migrating elsewhere and a worrying drop in tax revenue for this village of 3,500. Hoosick, the surrounding township, claims an equal number of residents.

The group - grassroots collaborators and town officials, 42 in all - met in the bowels of the old Armory, a 19th century redbrick fortress that looms near the center of town. Their aim was to concoct a survival strategy; a hail-Mary pass to save Hoosick Falls from sliding into economic oblivion.

“No idea was too crazy,” says David Borge, the Village Mayor who helped mastermind the project, a joint initiative between the village and township. “There was a real energy in the room and a lot of creative thinking.”

From planting marijuana in verdant fields around the village, to building a network of snowmobile trails, to marketing low-cost space to start-up entrepreneurs, ideas buzzed around the room. Calling themselves 

, they got to work, hiring a consulting company with $25,000 that was left in the village coffers from a state redevelopment grant, and drafting a plan for economic renewal. The group was determined to forge a new identity to revitalize their town.

“There was a feeling that things were happening. An excitement about the possibilities,” says Borge, pushing back a sweep of his woolly salt-and-pepper hair.

toxic chemicals were discovered in the municipal water system

It began when Michael Hickey’s father died of kidney cancer in 2013, not long after retiring as a longtime factory worker in the local plastics plant. Convinced the village was reporting an unusually high rate of cancer, Hickey started asking questions.

“When you live in a small town where everyone knows their neighbors, it’s easy to spot that a lot of relatively young people are dying of cancer,” Hickey says. He confirmed his hunch with the town GP, whose medical practice serves a roster of 5,000 patients.

Hickey quickly turned his focus to the hardscrabble neighborhood around the plastics plant, where neighbors often talked of strange-smelling tap water and acrid fumes from the factory smokestacks. He knew the plastics facility sat some 300 yards from an underground well that feeds the village's water treatment plant.

Blocked from running tests near the plant, Hickey collected water from his own kitchen sink and even snuck testing kits into a local McDonald's and a Dollar Store bathroom not far from the village, sending the samples to a lab in Canada for analysis.

Today the 37-year-old insurance underwriter is a local folk-hero to many in Hoosick for his dogged determination to declare the water here unsafe. For Hickey, it was a battle he had to wage.

“I love the town and the community. I didn’t want to hurt it, but this was just too important to ignore. I did it for my son who was born as my father was dying,” Hickey says of his decision to bring his research to local, county and finally state authorities.

What Hickey had discovered was that high levels of perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a chemical linked in some studies to kidney and testicular cancer as well as thyroid disease, were tainting the village water system as well as numerous private wells in the surrounding township.

But despite his and others’ prodding, nearly a year and a half went by from the time New York was first warned of possible contamination, in August 2014, until 

State health officials alerted villagers to stop drinking the water

. Recently, faced with the worst environmental crisis of his five-year administration, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has promised $10 million to install a new filtration system and has unlocked state Superfund money. Early this year, a temporary filtration system serving more than 4,000 customers was installed in the village. By March, the state Health Department had declared the village water safe to drink.

But the water crisis has left townspeople fearful. Many are still reluctant to drink the tap water, relying instead on free bottled water stacked high at the local supermarket. When the results of residents’ blood tests were sent out by the Health Department in June, another wave of panic rolled over the town.

Among the 2,000 tested, results showed hundreds of townspeople had levels of PFOA in their bloodstream 11 times higher than the national average. The Environmental Protection Agency insists these levels merely reflect a person’s exposure to the chemical and aren’t necessarily predictive of long-term health problems. But for residents here, it’s the lack of certainty that’s most unnerving.

Indeed, for many residents, Hoosick, already struggling with decades of economic decline, has been irretrievably damaged.

“We’re trying to move forward and keep going, but it feels as if there’s a stigma attached to living here,” says Michelle Baker, a Hoosick resident. “My 14-year-old daughter grew up on PFOAs. They were in her baby bottle. How do you come back from that?”

Dodge Industries, an Eisenhower-era company that produced Teflon products ranging from fabric to foil to yarn in its plant near the Hoosick River, used PFOAs as a processing agent. Dodge bought the plant in 1954 and it has been sold a half-dozen times since then, ending up in the hands of Saint-Gobain Performance Plastics in the 1990s. Saint-Gobain has agreed to help fix the PFOA problem, even though much of the pollution may have been taking place for decades before they came to town.

“Back in the 1950s and ‘60s, they called Hoosick Falls the Teflon capital of the world,” says Phil Leonard, the town historian and treasurer of the local 

. Shaking his head, Leonard looks up at wall of faded maps and old factory photos. “Who would have imagined it would lead to all this?” he asks.

At 90 years old, Leonard remembers the boom times, and as a historian he can trace the town’s economic ups and downs right back to its beginning in 1794. In its heyday in the late 1800s, Hoosick Falls was an industrial powerhouse. The town’s major employer, Walter A. Wood Mowing and Reaping Co., was the largest manufacturer of farming equipment in the world by the 1890s.

“Wood was smart enough to start mass production lines. Rumor is that Ford himself came here to see how it was done,” he muses, making his way up a narrow staircase to the second story of the small museum, a converted townhouse brimming with memorabilia.

Wood’s success - at its peak his factory employed 2,000 people and took up over 85 acres of land - drew other businesses and factories to Hoosick Falls and the village population swelled to 7,000, with a significant portion of immigrants among the newcomers: Irish, Italians and Lithuanians. But the town’s golden age ended with World War I as Wood’s sales in Germany and Eastern Europe dried up. After the war, unable to hold off competitors like John Deere, the vast factory closed in the 1920s, its sprawling grounds sitting mostly vacant for decades. After several fires claimed parts of the vast, vacant facility, it was finally leveled in the 1970s.

A second, less sweeping renaissance boosted the town’s fortunes after World War II when 11 factories, employing a total of just over 1,000 workers, set up shop in in Hoosick, despite its relatively remote location in the northeastern outback of Rensselaer County.

“People would ask how a little town in the middle of nowhere could attract all those factories,” Leonard says as he rifles through old clippings with titles like “Hometown Heroes” and “Hoosick Factories, 1966.”

“There was an industrial spirit here that was undeniable. But that dried up decades ago. It’s no wonder people are desperate for a political solution. Some are even turning to Trump.”

Today, two factories remain in Hoosick Falls: Lovejoy Chaplet, a precision machinery maker with under 50 employees, and Saint-Gobain with under 200 employees.

“When I came back to town in 1978, the jobs had begun to dry up. In a couple of decades, we went from being a manufacturing behemoth to nothing,” says Dennis Casey, a Hoosick Falls resident and member of the village zoning board.

For town historian Leonard, it was the Elks’ Club leaving town that foretold the future.

“When an Elks leaves town, you’ve lost your middle class,” he says. “Now the building’s a parking lot.”

As industry departed, looking for easier transport connections and cheap labor, so did jobs and people. The population has fallen by about 1,000 residents since 1960, according to US census figures. A 

, projects further population declines in both the village and the surrounding township by 2019. Most alarming is that the population groups losing numbers fastest are 35 to 44 and 45 to 54, leaving the town with an aging population and fewer residents in their prime working years. The Camoin figures also show that retail jobs in Hoosick Falls are down 27% since 2004.

A walk around Hoosick Falls confirms the findings. Boarded-up shops and shuttered restaurants claim much of the downtown. Hand-painted ‘For Sale’ signs dot the main drive into town, rooted on the lawns of once elegant Victorian houses. But despite the derelict properties, there is a charm here that even economic hard times can’t destroy. The sturdy, red-brick buildings with rounded arches and eccentric rooftop designs, the steel-girder bridges, and fading Victorian mansions all inspire fantasies of refurbishment on a massive scale.

When Garry Brown first came to Hoosick in 1994, he took on what may be the village’s biggest fixer-upper. He was in his early 30s, living with his wife in a cramped apartment in Schenectady. He was also one year into owning a brewery-pub in economically beleaguered Troy on the outskirts of the state capital, about 25 miles from Hoosick.

“We fell in love with the area and the town of Hoosick. It seemed liked a small community, but a complete community,” says Brown who, in jeans, baseball cap and work boots, looks more a construction worker than a brewer. “We were able to buy a 110-acre farm in West Hoosick that fit our price range, which was pretty meager. That was the first commitment.”

Three years later, Brown took a bigger leap, investing upwards of $3 million in an old paper mill outside the village. Built in 1854 on the banks of the Walloomsac River, with a waterfall churning nearby, Brown bought the property from a pneumatic valve manufacturer eager to move out.

“There were 40 people assembling valves here,” he says. “The company president showed me around and ended up by bringing me out on the bridge with the waterfall behind, the cream of the tour. That’s what sold me on the property. It reminded me of the old breweries I had toured in England and in Germany back when were first researching the whole brewpub idea.”

Brown is quick to admit he took a risk in Hoosick, but coming off a high-stakes venture in Troy – where he had bought a 150-year-old warehouse for $63,000, pouring time and money into renovation, creating the brewpub that garnered $6 million in sales last years – he was determined to roll the dice again.

“Hoosick is like a miniature Troy. Factories and jobs left Troy, property got cheap and a lot of people stepped in who were young and strong and wanted to do something, Brown says of the small city on the Hudson. “Now there’s a bit of renaissance going on there.”

Leaning back in an overstuffed armchair that sits in the corner of his repurposed mill, a view of the waterfall cascading behind him, Brown adds, “I’m realistic enough to know that Hoosick Falls won’t recover in the same way as Troy, but I like to think it’s possible for the town to stage a comeback.”

He sees part of the solution in linking local agriculture to local industry. His own five-year plan includes building a malting facility and hop processing plant, ideally using crops harvested from local farmers. Brown hopes to see production at the Hoosick brewery, where current output is about 6,000 barrels a year or about 186,000 gallons, jump three-fold to 20,000 barrels for broader distribution in the Northeast.

“New York is not just trying to bring craft brewing back to the state, but also raw material production like barley and hops,” Brown says. “It’s not far-fetched when you consider New York was the center of hop-growing before Prohibition.”

As for the water, at the very heart of craft beer brewing, the well at 

 has tested “no-detect” in several separate samplings. “It’s been very scary, but what are we going to do? Up and run?” he says. “We have roots here and I’m not leaving.”

There are other green shoots in town as well. This month 

, a structural steel supplier to the construction industry, is moving to Hoosick Falls, taking over an 80,000-square foot manufacturing site left vacant for years. A tractor dealership has just opened on the edge of the village.

“These are relatively small businesses, but they mean something to the community,” Mayor Borge says. “It’s a beginning.”

Some people don’t put stock in the idea of luring manufacturing back to town. They see solutions in local agriculture than can tap into the green economy or alternative energy - 1,900 solar panels, almost 500 kilowatts, were recently installed on a town landfill site - or a combination of art and tourism to bring in much needed visitors. The town’s Armory, sold for $1 to a not-for-profit group HayC3, is used for a variety of artistic programs.

“It rubs me the wrong way to say manufacturing jobs in the U.S. are gone, but they sure aren’t coming here anymore,” says Craig Pine, an engineer who works in Troy, a 45-minute commute from town.

“The truth is, what industries of any sort would line up to move here, a Superfund site?” he adds, walking an old railway bed that winds its way along the Hoosick River. Not far along the trail, he points to the metal frame of the Saint-Gobain plastics plant and two of the three village water wells nearby. A Little League baseball game is in full swing within earshot.

“It still feels like a small town here, despite everything that’s happened,” Pine says looking out over the river. “There’s a sense of community inherent to this village…it’s one of the few things we have left to brag about.”

 is a London-based freelance writer. She has worked as a staff reporter for Reuters and Dow Jones Newswires. Her work has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Newsday, Narratively, and Art & Antiques Magazine, among others.

 is a freelance photographer and writer based in Vermont by way of the Bronx.

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After years of economic decline, Hoosick Falls seemed ripe for a revival. Then they started testing the water.

Caitlin Randall