Coming Home on Purpose: The McCallsburg Returnees Who Left Everything — and Found What Actually Matters

The U-Haul Goes Both Ways

There's a certain kind of courage it takes to leave a small town. You load up your car, wave goodbye to the same faces you've known since kindergarten, and head toward whatever version of "more" you've been dreaming about. McCallsburg has watched plenty of its own do exactly that — and nobody begrudges them for it.

But here's the thing nobody talks about as much: the U-Haul that comes back.

Over the past several years, a quiet but meaningful wave of former residents has been making the return trip to McCallsburg. Not out of defeat. Not because the big city chewed them up. But because, after some time away, they made a clear-eyed, intentional decision that this is where they actually want to be. That distinction — choosing home rather than defaulting to it — turns out to make all the difference.

What Leaving Actually Teaches You

Ashley Dornbush grew up in McCallsburg, left for Des Moines at 22 to work in marketing, and spent nearly a decade building a career and a social life in the city. She was good at it. She had the apartment, the friend group, the weekend plans. And then, somewhere around year eight, something started to feel off.

"I had everything I thought I wanted," she says, sitting at her kitchen table in the house she now rents just a few blocks from where she grew up. "But I kept having this weird feeling that I was performing my life more than I was actually living it. Like, I was doing all the right things for an audience I didn't even know."

What she missed wasn't nostalgia, exactly. It was something harder to name — a sense of being known. Not famous, not impressive, just genuinely recognized by the people around her.

That experience tracks with what psychologists call a "belonging gap" — the difference between being socially connected and feeling truly embedded in a community. Urban environments offer plenty of the former and can be surprisingly stingy with the latter. In a town like McCallsburg, where your neighbor probably coached your Little League team and your pharmacist went to school with your mom, that kind of embedded belonging is almost unavoidable.

The "I Could Never Go Back" Myth

For a long time, returning to a small town carried a stigma. It meant you didn't make it, or you gave up, or you just couldn't hack it out there. That narrative is losing its grip — and the people who've come back to McCallsburg are a big reason why.

Tyler Hackett moved to Chicago after college, spent six years in finance, and came back two years ago with his wife and their toddler daughter. He's now helping run his family's grain operation and doing some remote consulting on the side.

"I used to think coming back would feel like shrinking," he admits. "But honestly? It feels like the opposite. I have actual influence here. I coach youth basketball. I go to town council meetings. In Chicago, I was just another guy in a building. Here, what I do actually matters to people I care about."

That sense of tangible impact is something researchers who study community attachment point to again and again. In smaller places, individuals can see the direct results of their involvement — a fundraiser that saves a local program, a business that fills a gap on Main Street, a volunteer hour that keeps something running. That feedback loop is deeply satisfying in a way that's hard to replicate in a larger, more anonymous setting.

New Eyes on an Old Place

What makes the current wave of McCallsburg returnees particularly interesting isn't just that they're coming back — it's what they're doing once they get here. They're not simply slotting back into the lives they left. They're bringing skills, perspectives, and ambitions that are quietly reshaping the community.

Ashley, for example, has started offering affordable social media and branding help to a handful of local small businesses, most of which had little to no online presence before she came back. Tyler has been working with other young farmers in the area to explore cooperative purchasing arrangements that could lower input costs across multiple operations.

These aren't grand gestures. They're small, practical contributions — but they're the kind that compound over time. And they're possible precisely because these returnees spent years somewhere else developing expertise that McCallsburg can genuinely use.

"I think the best version of this place is one where people come back with something to offer," says longtime resident and retired school administrator Carol Pemble, who has watched several generations of McCallsburg kids leave and, increasingly, return. "It's not about staying forever. It's about what you bring back when you do."

The Trade-Offs Are Real (And Worth Talking About)

Nobody coming back to McCallsburg pretends it's a perfect trade. The restaurants are fewer, the job market is narrower, and if you're used to a city's pace and variety, there's an adjustment period that can be genuinely hard.

Ashley laughs when asked about the transition. "The first few months, I drove to Ames for things I could have just ordered online. I think I was testing myself. Like, am I really okay with this?"

The answer, for her, turned out to be yes — but she's clear that it's not the right answer for everyone. What made it work wasn't a romantic attachment to the idea of small-town life. It was an honest accounting of what she valued most: stability, relationships, a slower pace, and the ability to actually know her neighbors.

For others, that accounting comes out differently, and that's fine. The returnees themselves are pretty consistent about not evangelizing. They didn't come back to prove a point. They came back because it made sense for their lives.

What Home Actually Means

There's a version of the McCallsburg story that's all about roots — the deep, generational kind that keep people anchored to a place out of tradition or obligation. That story is real and worth telling. But there's another version emerging alongside it, one about people who left, tested themselves, grew, and then made a deliberate choice to invest their growth somewhere that genuinely needed it.

That version is, in its own quiet way, pretty remarkable.

McCallsburg isn't trying to compete with Des Moines or Chicago. It doesn't need to. What it offers — real community, real relationships, a place where you're a person rather than a profile — turns out to be something a surprising number of people will eventually come looking for.

And when they come looking, more and more of them are finding their way back here.