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knew there was little money. All five of the kids have a better life than we had.”
    Although Masterson misses the quiet farm life, she appreciates that many newcomers contribute to the community: “I know there’s an awful lot of young people out there who’ve come here and tied this place together the way we once did with the farms.” The Mastersons did not sell all of their land; they gave some of it to their children who have remained in town.
    Four of the Mastersons’ five children stayed in Lincoln, an important dynamic in a town bonded in part by multigenerational families. All of Donald and Beverly Brown’s three sons have remained, as has Fletcher and Harriett Brown’s daughter.
    â€œUnlike suburbia, where there are whole neighborhoods of people the same age, there are a lot of different generations within each family still here in Lincoln,” Beverly Brown says. At any moment on a Sunday morning in church, it is possible for me to see a host of Browns: Jim and Judy, as they sing in the choir; Harriett, a deacon, passing the offering plate along the pews; Beverly, tracking down a cassette tape of the service so that the elderly who can’t make it to church are able to hear what they missed; and brothers Fletcher and Donald, deep in conversation before the bells have rung and called them to their pews, discussing, perhaps, the spring sugar run.
    I am always moved when I see the Browns together in church—more now than seven years ago, when I failed to understand the complex blood network that links one of Lincoln’s first families. I never went to church in Brooklyn, and I started attending in Lincoln only when Fletcher Brown commented on the fact that my house and the church share the same driveway. Noting my unique proximity to the sanctuary—forty yards, closer than the parsonage—Fletcher said, in his wry and unmistakably understated voice, “Don’t have much of an excuse not to go to church now, do you?”
    Shame first brought me there, but fellowship and faith have led me to stay.
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    The farms may have left Lincoln, but the sense of community hasn’t. There is no question that the town has changed, that the influx of new people has transformed a once self-contained rural community into something vaguely suburban. Each weekday morning, a lot of Lincoln winds its way down the road that milk tankers once took, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find a stoplight someday where the road to Lincoln meets the road to Burlington.
    Clearly the town lost something when it lost its farms, but sometimes I’m not sure it lost anything more substantial than cows. That sounds glib, but it may also be true. Alice Leeds teaches fifth and sixth grade at the elementary school. She has taught in rural communities in the South; she has taught in midtown Manhattan. Inspired this spring by the case of the Chicago parents who left their two young children home alone while they took a Caribbean vacation, Leeds devoted class time to the ethical issues of leaving children unsupervised. What her students told her surprised her.
    â€œMost of the kids—two-thirds—said they’re never scared when they’re home alone,” Leeds says. “People feel responsible for each other here, and the kids understand that Lincoln is their place. They’re comfortable here, they feel safe here.”
    If I worried for Lincoln’s soul, those concerns were eased at the funeral service this May for Tari Shattuck, a forty-one-year-old neighbor who died of leukemia. Shattuck was born in Paris and raised in Texas. She arrived in Lincoln in 1972, a Democrat in a Republican hill town. Among the women and men who spoke at her service—at which every seat was filled and some mourners had to view the eulogy on video monitors set up in the Sunday-school classrooms—was Fred Thompson.
    Thompson’s Lincoln roots date back to the nineteenth