Residents gather for coffee in the morning at Daylight Donuts, plan their evenings around youth choir concerts and speak highly of the Saturday night sirloin specials at the Plains Tavern.

“Plains is definitely a typical small town, with a small-town atmosphere,” said Elton Argo, the school district superintendent. “It’s a safe, very comfortable community.”

But there are also empty storefronts, residential streets with overgrown sidewalks, and many people who grew up here now raising their own families elsewhere. All that has some worried that Plains is at a tipping point: It can either thrive in its own right or fade into a bedroom community whose residents drive somewhere else to work, eat and shop.

Plains, like so many Midwestern towns, came of age in the early 20th century as America expanded westward and turned virgin prairie into endless farmland.

A 1916 book speaks rosily of the town’s population growth and new shops, but the fortunes of the region tumbled in the 1930s and ’40s, when topsoil blew away and agricultural productivity plummeted. Though conditions eventually improved, much of the western Great Plains never fully recovered.

Plains’s economy remains largely agricultural, but unlike a century ago, residents now must look beyond downtown to buy the essentials. Shoppers can purchase some food at a gas station in town, but a full selection of groceries requires a 14-mile drive to Meade, the county seat, or a longer one to Liberal, an economic center with about 20,000 residents, several meatpacking plants and large chain stores and restaurants.