Trivia: Andy and Helen not only married but had a baby, Andy, Jr.- he was never seen but he was mentioned on an episode of Mayberry RFD.
What bothered me most about the candlestick phone was that in the movie Return to Mayberry- made and set in 1986 (opening)- they still had it! I grew up in an area that made Mayberry look like Charlotte and even we had push button phones and were off party lines and operator assistance long before 1986.
In that movie Otis had kicked the hooch but Howard was still, not surprisingly, single. (Howard Sprague had two afterlife appearances: he (the character and the actor) was on an episode of It’s Garry Shandling’s Show and sorta kinda an episode of St. Elsewhere; in the latter, a hospital exec played by Jack Dodson in a recurring role has surgery and while delirious begins talking about Opie and Floyd and haircuts.)
Ron Howard did a great “Opie’s Back” sketch on SNL back in the '80s, though I can’t google it up. Among other things it addressed long before Funny or Die why come there ain’t no black people in Mayberry.
Actually there was a black family in Mayberry, the Bartons.
But they weren’t in The Andy Griffith Show; they were in the spin-off Mayberry RFD which was set in the town of Mayberry after Sheriff Andy Taylor moved to Raleigh. Which is sort of sinister - it appears the reason there hadn’t been any black people living in Mayberry before was because Sheriff Andy was preventing it.
Of course the real reason is because Mayberry was based on Griffith’s hometown Mount Airy, North Carolina. And Mount Airy is a town up in the Appalachians and it really didn’t have a black population.
As for the colorful characters that live in Mayberry, you can consider who Mount Airy’s other famous residents were besides Griffith: Chang and Eng Bunker.
The county is called Mayberry County, which suggests that the county seat may be Mayberry, even though Mount Pilot has the bigger population and is more developed.
The position was elected. There was an episode (Episode 148: Barney Runs for Sheriff), where Barney runs against Andy for the position.
Mayor Stoner was definitely married - Andy had to give up his favorite fishing pole to get this beautiful blue housecoat Aunt Bee wanted and which Mayor Stoner had bought for his wife.
Okay, 1 percent of U.S. counties have two county seats, and a third of those are in Arkansas and another third are in Mississippi. I still don’t see any that have two sheriffs.
A lot of counties that don’t have two seats have courthouse annexes in other cities.
Example: Baldwin County is a huge coastal county in Alabama with its seat in a town called Bay Minette. When the county was founded Bay Minette was it’s largest city; now it has a population of around 8,000 while tourism and retirees have exploded the populations of the beach areas (which had year round residents of a few hundred in the early 20th century but now have year rounds in the tens of thousands and seasonals in the hundreds of thousands) while the community of Fairhope has become very prosperous and the spillover from Mobile/Mobile County has created numerous suburbs, some of which are a 50 mile drive from Bay Minette, but at the same time Bay Minette did not want to relinquish the benefits of being the county seat.
Instead, they built smaller courthouses in two other cities. They are satellites but they do everything the main courthouse does: titles, taxes, even court. Also they’re rarely called “courthouse annex” by residents but just “the courthouse”.
I’ve known other counties that do likewise, and it’s usually when the county seat is a long way away from some of the outlying cities. Not sure when it started (my guess would be it dates back to at least when the railroads totally changed access to cities), but could be that Mayberry’s a satellite to Mt. Pilot.
Off topic, but isn’t Yell County where Mattie’s from in True Grit?
It’s pretty clear to me that Mayberry is a fictional substitute for Mount Airy and is the county seat of its own county and it doesn’t really make any sense to try to fit it into the actual geography of North Carolina.
I just noticed that there’s a town near the real Mount Airy called “Pilot Mountain.” There’s our Mount Pilot. Only in real life, Pilot Mountain is much smaller than Mount Airy; whereas, in the show, Mount Pilot seems to be bigger than Mayberry.
Andy’s powers and duties fit nicely with those of a constable or town marshal. “Marshal” sounds too western-y and the folks of Mayberry wouldn’t be comfortable with a high-falutin’ title like “constable.” So “sheriff” it is.