I’m from Peterborough. It’s a manufacturing town that got its start as Scott’s Mills in the early 1800s, then grew around hydroelectric developments on the Otonabee River. Around 1900 it was known as ‘the Electric City’. It had manufacturing such as Outboard Marine Corporation, Canadian General Electric, Quaker Oats. It has a canoe museum, the Peterborough Liftlocks, and the first reinforced-concrete or possibly largest (I believe) bridge in the British Empire (the Hunter Street bridge). But manufacturing has contracted.
Trent University was founded in the 1960s. Sir Sandford Fleming College arrived in the 1970s. I don’t have the impression that Trent University and SSFU dominate the culture of Peterborough the way people here are describing for places like Baton Rouge. But I haven’t lived there since I was a kid, so I could be wrong.
Here’s another example - Lewisburg Pennsylvania (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania - Wikipedia) has a population of about 6000 people, and has existed since the 1700’s - it had a good position for commerce due to proximity to a major river. In the 1800’s a university was founded there (The University of Lewisburg, later renamed “Bucknell” (Bucknell University - Wikipedia). The university has 3000 students, so obviously university issues and events will have a major impact on the town, even though the town had a lengthy history prior to the university and even though the town has other major industries (Lewisbury Federal Peniteniary for example, which is why the university radio station had a “Prisoner Request” program). If Lewisburg had 100,000 people, it probably wouldn’t be considered a college town, but with a student population that equals half the town population, it certainly is one.
The closest thing I’ve seen in Canada to a place having a US-style college town vibe is Waterloo, Ontario. Even then it wasn’t like a Boulder or Madison; it was more like College Station, Texas, which doesn’t have the college feel one would expect from being the host community of a very large public university.
I often feel that Columbus OH is a college town – perhaps the largest college town in the US – because of how the OSU dominates the city culturally. That’s in spite of it being not only the state capital, but also the largest city in the state.
Yes I was coming in here to mention Kitchener-Waterloo. With 2 universities (and a college) the rental market/bars/clubs etc are setup for students; but there are enough other people/economic activity that they aren’t the entire focus of the town.
On the other hand, I don’t ever think of Columbus as a college town.
While OSU certainly dominates the the region just north of the central city extending eastward a bit, there is nothing “college” about the southeast, southern, or western parts of the city and the many suburbs that were coerced into joining the city, (through the deft threat of exorbitant water rates), have all tended to keep their own cultures. Even places like Germantown, that seem well suited to be included in the OSU aura, seem to be disconnected from the university.
I am not claiming that no argument could be made for it being a college town, but there is an awful lot of Columbus with absolutely no connection–physical, fiscal, or cultural–to the university.
= = =
An interesting contrast in “college town” vs not “college town” is Ypsilanti, MI. Just six miles east of Ann Arbor, Ypsi hosts Eastern Michigan University with a student body (26,000+) that is actually a bit larger than the city itself (22,000). However, while kids thinking of college–particularly in education and special education fields–think of Eastern, and the city certainly is affected financially by the school, the presence of several large automotive plants, with the very large number of “immigrants” from Kentucky who moved to the area to work in them, has resulted in the cultural feel of the city remaining “manufacturing.” The very close proximity of Ann Arbor has quite likely drawn off a lot of the “college” oriented business, as well, especially since EMU is on the Ann Arbor side of town, making the drive to the larger and more diverse Ann Arbor a matter of just a few minutes.
Since Ithaca also has Ithaca College, it’s a college town. The city’s population is about 30,000, but there are about 20,000 at Cornell and another 6000 at Ithaca.
Generally, towns that house land grant universities (which are generally colleges with a name like “Statename State”) are college towns. The land grants were set up to establish colleges, and the locations were usually small towns, often chosen for their geographic location (State College, for instance, is very near the geographical center of Pennsylvania).
By “college town” I meant a smallish population cluster where the college is the principal business.
In the other thread I was specifically referring to Kirksville, Missouri. The town has a population of 16,998 and is home to Truman State University (formerly known as Northeast Missourio State, originally Northeast Missouri Normal School.) Truman State has approximately 6,000 students and A.T Still (an osteopathic medical school) adds maybe another 1,000.
The colleges aren’t the “only” reason for Kirksville’s existence. It’s the county seat for Adair County and home of some relatively small businesses. But it’s also likely that without the schools, Kirksville would be more like its county seat neighbors, Lancaster (population 4,171) to the north or Macon (population 5,538) to the south.
Keep in mind that there are over 2000 four-year colleges in the US.
College towns tend to have a different feel to them than other towns. I’m not sure how to describe it though. I usually hear the term as a positive thing, but maybe that’s just due to the folks I interact with most.
College towns can be big or small, although that depends what you think of as small or big (I always get a kick at hearing folks from China say they are from a tiny city of only 1 million). The University of Illinois is between the towns of Champaign and Urbana (the towns touch, and it’s mostly in Urbana), which have a combined population of <120,000. There are 40,000 students. A bit north is Kankakee, population 30,000. Not a college town (and kind of a shithole if you ask me, but that has nothing to do with schools or lack thereof).
The Village of Swarthmore is smack dab in suburban Philadelphia. The town itself is only 6000, but the metro area is maybe 6 million. The college has ~1500 students. Even though you can’t really tell when you’re leaving Swarthmore for any of the neighboring towns because they all butt up against each other, the town definitely has a college town feel to it.
El Paso, TX (pop 600,000) holds UTEP (20,000 students) and is not a college town, whereas Las Cruces, NM (pop 92,000) holds NMSU (17,000), and much more of a college town feel to it.
Although Columbus is the largest city in Ohio if you count the population within the city limits, it’s only the third largest (after Cleveland and Cincinnati) if you count the population within the metropolitan area. Columbus incorporated its suburbs more than Cleveland or Cincinnati did.
Way of an overstatement, I think. Most of the classical names, especially in the northeast, originate either because they celebrate the Greek and Roman states, the origins of democracies and republics, or because they were founded in the 1820s and were saluting the Greek War of Independence.
Syracuse, NY, was settled in the late 1700s and was incorporated as the Village of Syracuse in 1825; the university wasn’t founded until 1870. Ithaca, NY, was incorporated in 1821; Cornell not until 1850. Looking at a map of western new York is like looking at a classical atlas.
The two Athens, in Ohio and Georgia, are better examples of towns established to hold a university, though both had some small settlements in the 1700s before being chosen as the sites of the state’s university in 1804 and 1801 respectively. Not that Georgia was part of the Northwest Territory.
Even so, there are lots of towns and villages called Athens that have no connection to universities and many are from that era. Athens, NY (1805); Athens, AL (1818); Athens, KY (1826). There are at least a dozen other Athens in the U.S. as well.
The cost of living in Durham, NH isn’t less than the towns around it like the OP was talking about, though. We used to leave campus to shop because things were more expensive in town, not less, and people who could manage to find apartments in Lee or Dover usually paid less for them than those in Durham.
I live in a college town–Chico, CA, about 100,000 in the area. The college has ~17,000 students and dominates the downtown area. It’s one of the major employers and a big reason why Chico isn’t a cowtown. And of course, as so many people know, there is a lot of drunken partying. :rolleyes:
It’s a manufacturing town that got its start as Scott’s Mills in the early 1800s, then grew around hydroelectric developments on the Otonabee River. Around 1900 it was known as ‘the Electric City’. It had manufacturing such as Outboard Marine Corporation, Canadian General Electric, Quaker Oats. It has a canoe museum, the Peterborough Liftlocks, and the first reinforced-concrete or possibly largest (I believe) bridge in the British Empire (the Hunter Street bridge). But manufacturing has contracted.
