Chris Solari was hundreds of miles away from his hometown and driving along the interstate when he noticed a photograph of the Butler Farm Show sprawled across a billboard — a political advertisement.

A sports journalist for the Detroit Free Press and 1993 graduate of Butler Senior High School, Solari was not in Butler County when he saw the sign, a photograph taken after the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump and blown up for display near a field. He wasn’t even in Pennsylvania.

“How do you even digest the fact that you're driving in Michigan ... 300 miles from home, and there's your hometown — there it is, right there — as a political prop?” Solari said. “I mean, that's hard to digest.”

Solari hasn’t lived in Butler since 1995, he said, but he visits Butler County several times a year, reads the Butler Eagle and tries to stay updated on area events as much as he can.

Solari’s mother lives in Lyndora. His uncle lives in the South Hills near McQuistion Elementary School.

“I drove by the farm show grounds almost every day going to my mom’s house,” he said, recalling the news of the shooting. “So it puts everything really clear and fresh in my head.”

When the assassination attempt made national news, Solari said he was getting ready to bring his children to visit his mother-in-law as she returned home on hospice care.

“It was surreal,” he said. “Here I am, dealing with a completely different crisis of life, and this is one of the biggest stories of my lifetime happening at the farm show grounds of all places.”

“I'm like, how did that happen, knowing how close in proximity and how residential everything is around the farm show grounds?”

Reflecting on how they’d like Butler County to be remembered, residents past and present rarely touched on the assassination attempt, instead choosing to discuss the region’s closed down steel mills and history of immigration, wildlife and state parks, and memories of family picnics and youth baseball games.

“I love the city I live in; I love the spirit that can be found in any of the shops in town; l love when I see neighbors fixing up their home or playing with their kids,” Sue Convery wrote in response to a request for comment. “I don't want a memorial to what happened at the Farm Show.”

Others touched on how Butler is the birthplace of the Jeep. Still others said they hadn’t lived in Butler County for years, but described what life was like in the 1970s, how they still visit, and how they still view Butler County as home.

“Butler was a wonderful place to grow up,” Cookie Sanders wrote. “Large families were common. It was a melting pot of German, Italian, Polish descendants. It was a safe place where families looked out for each others’ kids and people could stop and talk to strangers from their front porch. Downtown Butler was a magical place before malls came into existence, especially at Christmastime.”

Some called Butler a dying town, while others pointed to its cultural offerings, including the Butler Little Theatre and Butler County Symphony Orchestra.

“People like what it used to be,” Dianne Beichner wrote. “Everyone is always reminiscing about what was, not what it is.”

Solari is familiar with the blows dealt to Butler County over the past several decades, from the population loss and subsequent business closures that followed when Pullman-Standard Car Manufacturing Co. closed in 1982, to the opioid epidemic.

Friends and family members either moved away or were “shuffled out” of the area in the wake of the steel industry’s decline.

“My family was touched with the downsizing in the 1980s with a lot of the layoffs that happened at some of the tangentially related businesses around those steel mills,” Solari said. “And I think everybody in the Pittsburgh area has seen that happen in that time frame up and down all three rivers.”

“Every mill town has their story,” he said. “A lot of them are similar, but Butler's is unique in that it isn't a Pittsburgh suburb. It’s isolated, right? There's no easy way in. There's no easy way out. So a lot of that pain and suffering is contained within the hills.”

Describing Butler County’s growth, and downtown Butler’s revitalization — from the reopening of the Penn Theater to the outdoor festivals — Solari said he hopes the attempted assassination doesn’t leave a “black mark” on the region.

“Butler is such a unique place, and it deserves better,” he said.

Solari was not born yet when John F. Kennedy was assassinated, or when news broke that Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed. But he remembers watching the assassination attempt of Ronald Reagan in 1981 on the news. He was six years old.

“Politicians, regardless of internal or external threats, are always targets for something like that,” he said. “When the vitriol is there ... that's kind of the critical lens that I've kind of taken from a journalism standpoint: This could have happened anywhere at any time in the last eight years.”

“This has nothing to do with the people of Butler,” Solari said.

Similarly, Jim Livermore, of Butler Township, wrote that “no single day comes close to defining” Butler County.

While the day of the attempted assassination likely will be remembered by rallygoers for the rest of their lives, “the rest of the community appears to have already moved on,” Livermore said, as the opening of the annual farm show indicated.

“No rational person,” Livermore said, would hold a community accountable for an incident carried out by a criminal just because it fell within its borders. The perpetrator wasn’t even a member of the community, he said.

“A walk through the farm show this week with a video camera and a narrator would have gone a long way,” said Kristopher Smith, of Butler Township.

“Sure, there would have been plenty of images of farm animals and tractors in any video essay of the farm show, but that would only be half the story that could be told,” he said. “The video would have shown young mothers and fathers reliving their own childhoods by enjoying carnival rides with their children.

“It would have shown teenagers enjoying their first taste of freedom under the stars without their parents but with their friends. It would have shown people from all walks of life and from all political points of view enjoying the evening as one community.”

A “video essay” such as he suggested also would show children misbehaving, people in vulgar T-shirts and other “less savory” aspects of the community, Smith said.

“But, at the end of the day, that's who we are as well,” he said. “That's any community. And I guess that's the point. The fact that all of this took place at the very site of such a horrible tragedy only a month earlier would only serve to show how strong our community is as well.”

A week after the shooting, Solari wrote an article for the Detroit Free Press, a cultural commentary delving into the history of his hometown, personal impressions and political landscape.

“Butler's not a prop,” Solari said. “Butler's a town full of real people, many of whom have (by) their families moving to town or to the country — whether it be the old Red Row in Lyndora, where a lot of the Slavics lived and were working at the mills, or the South Side where the Italians lived — dealt with some form of persecution to get to the point where our families are allowed to be part of the conversation in our community.”

“I mean, that’s the American story,” Solari said. “And the American story goes far beyond any of the problems. That’s a part of it, but there are a lot of good people in Butler who have integrated and become part of the fabric of not just the town, but the country.”

To Solari, Butler is both unique in its development and in how it has generated popular athletes and politicians, and emblematic of what people might imagine when they think of typical small-town America.

“Everything I've read over many, many years has made Butler to be Anytown, America,” he said.

He described Butler and the surrounding area as a middle child — trapped between its past and an imagined future of a small town turned into a big city.

“I hope the goodness of the people comes through,” he said, when asked about how he hopes the area will be remembered after the shooting.

Living in Williamston, Mich., Solari said he keeps finding unlikely connections to his hometown. You can leave, but somehow, he said, you keep finding your way back.

“It's funny, because when you're from Butler, no matter how far away you go, somehow you always find a connection,” Solari said. “My neighbor down the street ... he's a professor at Michigan State, he goes, ‘I was actually born in Butler.’”

An element of nostalgia remains for Solari, who said he misses Butler and the surrounding area. He visits each year for a week, he said.

“A lot of it has to do with the people, between family and friends who are still there,” he said. “And a lot of it is, I think, maybe the comfort of tradition. I mean, everybody in Butler knows certain things like, ‘Oh, you have to go to the Hot Dog Shop, or the Burger Hut.’”

“The farm show and the fair are so incredible, because you could be gone for 20 years and walk right back into exactly how it was 20 years ago, because nothing's changed (at those venues) as much as town itself has changed,” he said.

Solari said he remembers some changes, like when the woods that his school bus drove past were cleared to accommodate the construction of Moraine Pointe Plaza, where Sam’s Club now stands.

“I've seen a lot of those changes over the years that make it different,” he said. “But you know, at the heart it's still the same town. No matter how many people leave, no matter how many things have changed, the heart of the town is still the same.”