STURGIS – In the 1960s, the town of Leavenworth, Wash., was dying. The sawmill had closed it doors, the railroad had pulled up its tracks and the population shrunk from 5,000 to 1,000.

Then 11 women, members of the Vesta Junior Women’s Club, literally drew a line in the sand and said this had to stop.

Through the process of a number of town meetings, Leavenworth decided to reinvest itself as a Bavarian village – although no Bavarians lived in the village. One resident changed her hotel from the Chikamin Hotel to the Hotel Edelweiss. A couple of retail store owners changed their theme to Bavarian. And the town began to grow. Young people wanted to come back. New businesses wanted to move in. Even 40 families moved to Leavenworth from Bavaria.

The population now stands at 2,000 people – and the town’s Chamber of Commerce has 500 members.

Jack Schultz, author of “Boomtown USA: The 7 ½ Keys to Big Success in Small Towns,” shared many examples of towns like Leavenworth with local business and community leaders at the St. Joseph County Economic Development Corporation’s annual meeting at Sturges-Young Auditorium Wednesday. And each town illustrated at least one of his 7 ½ keys.

America has embarked upon the third wave of migration, Schultz told the audience. The first, from farms to urban areas, was sparked by the automobile and the telephone.

But now, thanks to air travel, the Internet, de-regulation of industries such as the airlines, communications and trucking, and quality of life, Americans are making another transition:  from the suburban areas to the “agurbs,” a word Schultz himself trademarked and describes as a prospering rural town with a tie to agriculture and a location outside a Metropolitan Statistical Area.

In his book, he identifies the top 397 small communities in America. While some small towns are successful, though, others are not. Through a decade and a half of studying small towns, Schultz came up with several characteristics that made some of the 15,800 small towns in rural America prosperous.

He shared these characteristics with his audience, peppering the talk with examples. Adopt a “can do” attitude, shape your vision, leverage your resources, raise up strong leaders, encourage an entrepreneurial approach, maintain local control and build your brand. The 7 ½ key is embrace the teeter-totter factor.

“Are you willing to back visionary people?” Schultz asked the audience, discouraging them from being people who resist change.

Schultz did spend a little time visiting in St. Joseph County, and said that while here he “saw a lot of great things.” However, his advice to the county was to take greater advantage of the area’s natural resources, to give the wonderful downtown areas some tender loving care (encourage people to live in or nearby those areas) and make them vibrant, and to cooperate regionally, utilizing resources and not viewing municipalities  such as cities or townships as “islands.”