Editor's Note: This article, reprinted with permission from The News & Observer of Raleigh, deals with an issue that increasingly dominates public discussion in Moore County.

Small-town charm is now so rare in the Triangle, it has become a commodity. Chambers of Commerce use it in their marketing slogans, such as Wendell's "Small Town Charm -- Capital City Connection."

Some in Hillsborough have given it a name -- "smalltownliness" -- and they're trying to sell the experience to tourists through a Web site, smallwander.com.

And the booming suburb of Morrisville aims to create an old-time Main Street feel where none ever existed.

As Triangle towns mesh into a single metropolitan area, no longer isolated from one another by forests and farmland, folks are striving to protect or recapture the small-town lifestyle.

"There are a lot of people in our transient society who really crave that," said Morrisville Planning Director Ben Hitchings. "They really want to connect with a community."

The Triangle has prospered in the decades since the development of Research Triangle Park and Interstate 40. And with plenty of inexpensive land at its rural edges, subdivisions have sprawled, with strip malls and plenty of parking to support commuters on the move. But all of this progress has come at a cost: Some residents say their towns have lost their souls, namely their once-vibrant downtowns where they ran into friends and neighbors just walking to school or running daily errands.

"It's the sprawl that's killing the inner town," said Nancy Baker of the Walkable Hillsborough Coalition, which aims to reverse this trend. "Our children are growing up in places where they pass each other in cars."

Allen Baddour, a Superior Court judge in Chatham and Orange counties, volunteers on a land-use planning committee in Pittsboro, where he has lived for the past 11 years. Baddour said governments have helped to diminish small-town life by moving services such as post offices and libraries out of town centers.

"You're less likely to combine that trip with shopping or dining, and all of a sudden you've created a car culture," he said. "When you insulate yourself inside your car ... you don't have those social interactions, and that tears at the fabric of a small-town community."

The Car-Culture Dilemma

Even people who decide to walk have trouble fitting into the car culture, said Tom Campanella, a city and regional planning professor at UNC-Chapel Hill and member of the Hillsborough Planning Board.

Drivers want wider roads to thin traffic and big parking lots for convenient shopping, while pedestrians need narrower roads, sidewalks and intimate spaces to feel safe walking and crossing streets, Campanella said. Twentieth-century suburban development, he said, is out of scale with the human body.

"You feel like a mouse on the face of the moon," he said.

Hence, a walkable streetscape, where one can find it, commands attention.

In the western Triangle, Pittsboro and Hillsborough attract their share of downtown foot traffic with their historic architecture, restaurants and arts attractions such as the General Store Cafe and the Blue Bayou Club.

"Part of the reason people want to come here is because of this circle and what's around here," said Baddour, sitting in the General Store Cafe and pointing toward the roundabout that carries U.S. 15-501 around Pittsboro's historic courthouse.

Pittsboro has its antiques dealers and art galleries, Hillsborough its colonial architecture and American Indian heritage. But both hearken to a time before a one-size-fits-all suburbia.

"You want to celebrate what you have that's unique and not lose it," said Holly Reid, co-founder of the Walkable Hillsborough Coalition. Taking a visitor on a brief walking tour of downtown, Reid pointed out a fish-and-game shop, a French bakery and a hardware store that coexist on antique King Street.

"There are actually people who drive to our town so they can get out of their car and walk," said Hillsborough resident Susan Hallman.

'Like a Theme Park'

The same thing happens in Wendell in eastern Wake County. Wendell doesn't have quite the draw of Hillsborough, but specialty businesses such as Kannon's clothiers do draw visitors to its quaint downtown.

Matt Sirios, proprietor of the Gallery Cafe, an upscale sandwich shop on Main Street, said Wendell offers an alternative to Capital Boulevard-style development in places such as North Raleigh and Knightdale. But, he added, the locally owned businesses that make a downtown distinctive cannot survive without support from their neighbors.

"If every person in this town ate with me once a month and spent $8, I would be a happy man," Sirois said. "People don't come downtown anymore like they used to."

Despite the challenges of attracting visitors to town centers, businesspeople and public officials are betting there's a market for it.

John Delconte, a founder of smallwander.com, compared small towns to living history museums such as Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia or Old Salem in Winston-Salem. He is convinced that tourists will pay for help in finding an authentic small-town experience.

"It's almost like these are theme park attractions," he said. "It's almost like a town filled with historical re-enactors."

Manufactured Main Street

In Raleigh and Durham, Triangle Town Center and The Streets at Southpoint try to recreate the Main Street shopping experience, though almost every patron has to drive to get to them.

Neo-urban developments, with homes clustered around commercial villages, are sprouting from Carrboro to Clayton.

Larger municipalities such as Raleigh, Durham and Chapel Hill are investing money to create more walkable downtowns, though not without controversy. In Chapel Hill, for example, town leaders think small-town familiarity requires taller buildings to allow more people to live closer together. Some critics think mid-rise condos -- such as the 10-story Greenbridge complex approved for West Rosemary Street, near the historic Northside neighborhood -- spell the end of what once proudly called itself a village.

But some of Hillsborough's biggest advocates say denser development, even in the Triangle's most historic downtown, could help them protect their small town from sprawl.

"The concept of density is not the enemy when you're talking about the vitality of a small town," Reid said. "We should not be afraid of density."

Forging New Identities

Towns such as Morrisville and Holly Springs are investing in their town centers, forging identities that history didn't give them.

"It's the symbolic heart of the community," said Morrisville's Hitchings. "It's the place that people think of when they think of the community."

Right now, that might be Mor-risville's Prime Outlets, a suburban outlet mall near the Raleigh-Durham International Airport with good highway access and little resemblance to the town's railroad-depot past. But the town is considering a plan to mix homes with historic character with 20 older buildings near the crossroads of Aviation Parkway and N.C. 54, the former site of a 19th-century train station.

Town leaders also want to develop a "Main Street" commercial district anchored by an arts venue that could lure visitors much like colonial architecture attracts them to Hillsborough. That would help distinguish Morrisville even as chain stores and cookie-cutter homes blanket the Triangle, making one town look like the next.

"We would love to host a family theater as something that people would think of when they think of Morrisville," Hitchings said. "Revitalizing your town center takes on even more importance in a situation where we have communities growing together physically."