When Broadband Never Quite Made It Here

You're passing through what used to be McCorkle, in northern Marengo County, Alabama, roughly halfway between Demopolis and Linden. This was never a big place, even in its heyday, just a cluster of homes and a community identity that shows up on historical maps more than modern ones. Today we're talking about maybe two dozen households scattered across a couple square miles of mixed pine and hardwood, part of the broader Linden vicinity where about fifteen hundred people call home across the whole area.

Marengo County overall sits at around eighteen thousand people, down from over twenty five thousand in 1960. The population here is about fifty five percent Black and forty two percent white, reflecting the deep Alabama Black Belt heritage. Median household income for the county hovers around thirty five thousand dollars, well below state and national averages. The biggest employers are still what they've been for generations: timber companies, the county government, a few small manufacturers, and catfish farming operations down toward the Tombigbee River. Most folks who work regular jobs are driving twenty, thirty, sometimes forty minutes each way. Internet service out here is spotty at best, mostly satellite or slow DSL where it exists at all.

Here's the thing about the remote work revolution: it never really reached McCorkle. While you heard all those stories during the pandemic about people fleeing cities for small town charm, about Zoom workers buying up farmhouses and renovating main streets, that required two things this place doesn't have: reliable high speed internet and available housing stock with modern appeal. The few young people from here who landed remote jobs mostly used them as exit tickets, moving to places like Tuscaloosa or Birmingham where they could actually keep a video call from dropping.

The great irony is that McCorkle has what the lifestyle magazines say remote workers want: quiet, affordable land, a slower pace. But without the fiber optic cables, it might as well be invisible to that whole wave of newcomers. A couple families did try to make it work around 2021, renting places near Linden, but buffering video calls and uploading large files on satellite internet wore them down within a year. So while America's rural places with gigabit internet saw their first population growth in decades, McCorkle just kept getting grayer and quieter, waiting for a digital revolution that never quite arrived.