Last fall, when he was running for mayor of Wilmington, Ohio, John Stanforth heard a rumor. A big company was testing an airfreight operation at the local airport, Wilmington Air Park. Whoever it was wanted to keep the project quiet. People who frequented the airport said the company was wrapping its packages in black plastic to obscure any lettering and referred to its experiment as Project Amelia. He wasn't sure which company it was, though some people were whispering it was Amazon.com.

Stanforth, 71, owns a storage business and looks a bit like the actor Jeffrey Tambor. In November he easily won the mayoral election. But even then he didn't ask too many questions about what was going on at the airport. He didn't want to jeopardize anything by being too nosy. "Guys, just bring me the jobs," he recalls thinking.

Wilmington is about 35 miles southeast of Dayton and has a population of about 12,000. Jobs used to be plentiful. The air park was a hub for Airborne Express and then DHL, the German shipping company, which bought Airborne Express in 2003. Thousands of people toiled at the airport, sorting packages that arrived and loading them onto outbound planes. It wasn't the most spiritually rewarding work, but it paid well, enabling package handlers to patronize the shops on Wilmington's Main Street, to get haircuts in the barbershop and body illustrations at the tattoo parlor. Even the local bookstore did great business, especially when Harry Potter novels came out. "They shut down the main street," Stanforth says wistfully, about the release party the store threw in 2007 for the seventh book in the Potter series. "There were people everywhere. Our Rotary Club made $1,000 selling shaved ice. A thousand bucks!"