McDade, Texas, is a town of about 600 people, not far from Austin. David Wharton spent five years getting to know most of those people, talking and listening and taking pictures. The result is The Soul of a Small Texas Town, a volume that combines photography, description, and history in a fascinating examination of the present and its interaction with the past. Many of us think we know slow-moving and sweaty towns like this, where nothing much seems to happen except the routine departures of young people looking for something better. This book goes far deeper, introducing us to people with stories worth telling.

This unique book consists of two parts of equal length. In the first part, 105 photographs display people of all ages in their environments. The photographs record the everyday lives of people who happen to be rural and Texan and not especially wealthy. Subjects include family life, the experiences of people of different ages, public celebrations such as weddings, reunions, VFW meetings, church services, the town’s Watermelon Festival, as well as less ritualized events--afternoons spent walking around town, or drinking beer, or taking care of family members at home. In many photographs, people look directly into the camera in poses that show they are able to decide what images of themselves they chose to project.

In a unique and remarkable feature of this book, Wharton pairs a description of the person and the setting with each photograph. Far more than mere captions, these descriptions tell stories about individuals, their families, their interests, their dispositions. In the text, the author describes with anecdotes or brief narratives how men or women like or hate some events, how people live out their understandings of religion and family, how the young people expect to leave McDade, how the town’s older people cope with mobility, illness, and death. Family relationships, some far happier than others, dominate many of the photographs and descriptions. The reader learns something of the background of the individuals and, in many cases, something of how they envision their future. Best of all, the reader who goes slowly through the photographs and descriptions finds himself getting to know people, cross-referencing the people in the photographs, saying “Oh” a lot. “Oh, I know them from a scene at the Baptist Church.” “Oh, I already met her parents.” “Oh, he is part of that crowd that drinks beer in front of Sam Earl’s.”

The history section relies on newspapers and written and oral recollections to tell the human narrative of what has happened since McDade was founded in 1871. The history moves through the early period of settlement with a new railroad, cattle rustling, and Texas frontier violence, to the growth of schools, churches, and a business district, to the coming of a significant German population, to the high point of business boosterism in the early 20th century, to tensions over a World War II camp built near McDade, to a declining population and the rise of disputes between “old-timers” and “new people” since the 1970s. Most notably, the historical section comes back to the individuals we met in the photography section, so we have a fuller understanding of the backgrounds of people we feel we already know.

The book is intriguing in part for what it is not. It is neither a celebration of community nor a lament about community’s passing. It has no theory to prove or disprove, no modernization or globalization thesis to dramatize, no gemeinschaft turning into gesellschaft. So many studies of rural people suggest a kind of timeless quality, as if they allow us to look into the eyes of the rural past. By getting to know the people of McDade as individuals--as well as one can get to know people through the medium of a book--The Soul of a Small Texas Town avoids the tendency to turn McDade’s residents into examples of a story we already think we know, or, worse yet, into mere data for scholarly analysis.