Charlie Walker remembers tramps hopping off freights and begging for a chance to sleep in his family's Trappe barn during the Great Depression.

"We didn't want them to burn down the barn, so we'd ask them to put their matches out in a can outside," recalls Walker, 87, drinking coffee with a group of old-timers at a Dairy Queen on Main Street. "The worst they ever did was we'd find hayseeds in the milk can - they helped themselves to milk."

The railroad does not come through Trappe anymore, the Montgomery County borough's past as an agricultural hub long gone. Subdivisions and day spas have replaced family farms as clusters of big-box stores line Route 422, and a "town center" of high-end retail with faux Main Line streetscapes rises southeast of Trappe.

Known as a Republican stronghold since the Civil War, Trappe surprisingly went for Barack Obama in the fall, 53 percent to 46 percent - nearly matching the vote in Pennsylvania as a whole, and the first time in generations that a Democratic presidential candidate won a majority of the borough's votes.

In many ways, Trappe reflects the political shift in suburbs across the nation - where a majority of voters now live - that elected Obama and rolled back the Republican gains of the 1980s and '90s.

But is something more permanent going on? Has the philosophy of lower taxes and smaller government that has dominated American politics since President Ronald Reagan's time begun to fall in the face of the economic collapse and the rapid pace of change?

If a new political dynamic is in the making, a realignment across America, Trappe is an ideal locale to start identifying the forces at play.

A little more than three months into the Obama Age, interviews find people in Trappe enduring the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression with hard-edged pragmatism, looking to Obama for help as they search for signs that he or anyone else can fix what ails America.

The exuberance that many felt in November after electing the first African American president has given way to support for the man in the White House, but worry about the long-term costs of his stimulus spending and bailouts for banks and automakers. In this largely white community, 20 miles northwest of Philadelphia, race and other social issues - immigration, abortion, gay marriage - hardly come up at all.

Last fall's vote in Trappe ratified demographic changes long in the making. The borough has doubled in size since 1970, to more than 3,300 residents, many of them educated and affluent "knowledge workers" drawn by pharmaceutical and financial-services firms in the area and Ursinus College next door in Collegeville, making Trappe more like New Jersey and less like the central Pennsylvania it once resembled.

"I used to know quite a few people in Trappe, but not today. It's exploded," says Don Dillon, 75, a retired operations manager for the Perkiomen Valley schools and a registered Republican who served on the Borough Council in the 1990s.

As on most mornings, he is drinking coffee with Walker and other members of the "old man's club" in Bill Higginson's Dairy Queen on Main Street, a good perch from which to discuss the changes in town. When Dillon moved to Trappe in 1959, he says, you could still hear Pennsylvania Dutch spoken in the area.

Walker, who remembers seeing people during the Great Depression so desperately poor that they begged local justices of the peace to throw them in jail on cold winter nights, says comparisons between the present day and that time are exaggerated.

"They're not crawling on their hands and knees around here that I can see," he says.

Growth and change

In the beginning, there was Ridge Pike, a long and winding road that went all the way to Philadelphia. Then came the highway. The Route 422 bypass was completed in 1985, during the Reagan era, opening up a straight shot to the big city. Trappe evolved from an exurb to a bedroom community as people moved farther west from the city and its inner-ring suburbs.

"Route 422 led to political changes which no one would have dreamt when it was built," says State Sen. Andrew Dinniman, a Democrat whose district includes Trappe.

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals put its main manufacturing complex at the interchange of Routes 422 and 29, and GlaxoSmithKline established a facility there. The borough and its surrounding towns grew more.

Dinniman says the pharmaceutical jobs attracted people with higher levels of education and income, both of which correlated with support for Obama in the 2008 election, according to exit polls. Census Bureau figures show that Trappe is well above the national average on both counts.

Though the demographic stage was set for Obama, events also were working against the GOP in Trappe last fall, as in many places. After eight years of the presidency of George W. Bush, anxiety was rising over the plummeting economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.