Back twenty years to... Saturday, April 8th, 2006. The work on the RV is all done, and she's ready to roll. The planning has all come together. My epic road-trip begins tomorrow, and out in the sunshine with a cold beer, I reassess my reasons for taking it on.

"There are some four thousand 'Ghost Towns' in the United States, most abandoned in the 19th and early 20th centuries, as people favoured the bigger cities – or remaining as casualties of changing industrial and agricultural trends or depleted natural resources. While a handful are developed into plush vacation spots, most now simply languish as broken-down ruins.

And this of course is my starting point. For good example: The iron mining town of Eagle Mountain in the Southern California desert, once had a population of over four thousand, around eight hundred homes, and a shopping centre. But due to the phasing-out of ore production in 1981, the post office – a fair indicator of a town's viability – finally closed its doors in 1983. This then, is my primary quest. An exploration into the factors at play, influencing the failure of any small town – towards its degeneration, disintegration and eventual abandonment – until it too might be classed in such a sorrowful way. Currently and terminally haunted, by the wearied ghosts of generations past – but existing still physically as merely a collection of structural 'remnants'. My feeling is – that the end for so many – 'is nigh'.

The Small Town once occupied a central place in American culture, society and politics, offering employment, economic stability, prosperity and contentment. Now Americans live in metropolitan areas because there’s far better paid, and more stimulating work, a broader choice of shopping, entertainment and 'lifestyle' activities, more energetic cultural institutions – all bringing a heightened sense of progression and participation. Modern America, with its more dominant urban culture, has now passed the small towns by – further relegating many of them to the cruel obscurity that initially had come from being basically abandoned by Amtrak trains and Greyhound buses – or simply bypassed by the Federal Interstate Highway system.

Towns of fewer than ten thousand, now encompass less than ten per cent of the population, but they remain, in the nostalgic imagination as the so schmaltzy vision of Disneyland's 'Main Street, U.S.A.' – or the parody of 'The Simpsons' Springfield."

In Search of Small-Town America: Volume 1 is a free-of-charge Pdf digital download – available from our shop. A table of contents, the introduction, the route-map – and featuring content on the first two States travelled: New Mexico and Arizona.

Jeremy Hammond I am a British writer and photographer, and have travelled through India, China, Southeast Asia and Australia, but most extensively in North America. In the late seventies and early eighties, I worked as lighting crew, and later designer, for many top-named British bands, on tours through Europe, Japan, and the USA. I’ve worked as a cruise-ship photographer, in office and store design, database design, visual arts book publishing and as a London-based freelance photographer, specialising in interiors and architecture.