We were headed that day to the easternmost point in the state, and for that matter the entire country. This is the tiny town of Eastport, population 1,300, which sits across a mile-wide strait from Campobello Island, which is on the Bay of Fundy in the Canadian province of New Brunswick. Physically, Eastport resembles the more celebrated resort areas along the Maine coast. Rocky fingers reach out into the sea; pine trees line the low hills; the downtown waterside structures are mainly two- and three-story brick storefronts, most of them built soon after a fire in 1886 destroyed all the wooden buildings of the old downtown. Eastport’s residential areas are mainly classic New England clapboard, at dramatically cheaper prices than in other seaside sites. You could buy a rundown house with a water view on two sides for less than $100,000. Eastport is so compact that as we circled over Campobello to land at Eastport’s small airport, we could easily keep all its houses, office buildings, and retail shops and cafés in view. That same view took in the 20 large, round enclosures in the bay in which 500,000 farmed salmon were swimming in circles nonstop.

A century ago, Eastport was a center of the Atlantic Seaboard sardine-canning industry, and its population was more than 5,000. The population has decreased in every census since then, and Maine’s state economist recently projected that if current trends prevail, by 2025 it will fall below 1,000. The people who remain in town are old even by Maine’s standards, with a median age of 55. By national standards they are also quite poor: across the country, the median household income was about $50,000 in 2012; in Eastport, it was less than $27,000. The income is even lower in the adjoining Passamaquoddy tribal reservation.

We had come to Eastport because we had heard that this little, hard-pressed town was the scene of an audacious and creative recovery attempt. By the time we left, a week later, we were convinced of the breadth and intensity of the effort. Whether this will be enough to return the town to economic and demographic health, I can’t say, nor can anyone living there. But the next time you hear some generality about the need for “resilience” and “reinvention” in America, give a thought to the 1,300 people of Eastport.

We came to Eastport as part of a project called American Futures. Since last summer, my wife and I have been visiting smallish cities, usually much bigger than Eastport, in which promising feats of economic or cultural reinvention are under way. The road-trip-by-air angle is partly a gimmick, but not entirely. America is full of small cities you would never happen to go through, because they’re not on an interstate or between points A and B. Eastport is an example. Yet virtually every town in America is, like Eastport, within a reasonable drive of one of the nation’s 4,000-plus small airports. This has been an intentionally skewed (and obviously unscientific) sample, in that we’ve looked for cities on the rebound to see what distinguishes them. But there have been more of them than we expected, including ones as seemingly beleaguered as Eastport.