On the way to the barber shop about an hour ago the thought hit me that even a small town needs a barber. Then I thought of other essential goods and services for a small town to be moderately self-sufficient:
Dentist
Restaurant/cafe/diner – some place that prepares meals for those who either can’t or don’t want to cook
Funeral Home
Something to pass for a health care facility – Doctor’s office maybe
Then it occurred to me that in many classic Westerns the town may not have had many of these things. Movies like Shane, High Plains Drifter, Silverado and perhaps even Tombstone (although that was a pretty good-sized town IIRC).
Using this basic premise as a jumping off place, limiting “small town” to less than 2000 people, and “modernizing” the town to early 21st Century, what are the necessities for a little town to prosper.
Don’t forget that mail-order, truck shipments, catalog services, etc., can help provide some of those less-than-immediately-essential things and that the little town might not have to have a video store, adult sex toys shop, massage parlor, and other things that may be “essential” for city-dwellers.
Oh, and please allow this Basic Small Town to be relatively isolated from larger population centers, at least three hours travel. This will keep “bedroom communities” and suburbs from clouding the issue. If it’s something you might really need and you can’t wait longer than three hours to get it when you need it, what ought the little town be able to provide?
This is mostly serious, although I can’t expect it to stay that way.
From my experience of isolated small towns in Australia, you can get by with just one general store, which has a petrol bowser, an ATM, and a post office agency, and can serve what passes as fast food. No health-care facility at all, except a few people trained in first aid: anything more serious, and you drive or get flown to the nearest hospital or doctor. Certainly no funeral home: not enough business to support one.
And the second business in town is likely to be a hotel or motel, which would have a restaurant or dinining room as well as providing somewhere for passing travellers to stay for the night.
Well, the hotel and the saloon are about the only constants besides the jail which is usually attached to the Lawman’s office (sheriff, marshal, ranger, police chief, head mercenary, hired killer, etc.).
There’s also a place to get a tub bath and a shave and a livery stable with a blacksmith shop. A feed store.
Have you ever wondered how every place big enough to have a few kegs of beer and a few shelves of hard liquor always has a piano? Imagine the sturdiness of a piano after being hauled across the prairie on a conestoga wagon, a train, or a stage coach.
Well, in Deadwood they’ve got a couple bars and brothels, a hotel, a livery, a doctor, some Chinese people who seem to be food vendors and launderers, a hardware store, a lot of little entrepeneurs who sell food items, and a shipping firm. Oh, and there’s a bathhouse. I’ve just finished the second season - looks like they’re getting a bank. Doesn’t seem to be a funeral home. They do okay, if filthily, with those few services, and didn’t have all of them when the show started.
I’m so glad you mentioned Deadwood since it’s the best attempt to be authentic of any period piece I know of. Some of Eastwood’s towns have the look (Pale Rider for example). And I thought Shane paved the way for more realistic towns as far back as the early 50’s. But Hollywood seems to have either forgotten or just brushed aside the concept of realistic small towns. Most of them seem to have anything you could find in the average state capital.
It’s as if the only real essentials were whiskey, cards, and a place to sleep off a good drunk – jail or a hotel.
And hookers. And blackjack! Giles nailed it pretty good. These days, if you have Medi-Vac capability, then an EMT can handle most things locally. One good General Store, where the help wears several hats, a diner, a gas station and an “Authority of some sort” office and you’re all set.
If it’s a three hour drive from larger population centers, your town is probably the county seat. In which case, you’ll have the various county offices, including the sheriff’s department, the county court, the recorder’s office, the assessor’s office.
Some other likely businesses: grocery store, gas station and service garage, real estate office, lawyer’s office, newspaper, farm implement and feed store, hardware store.
In my little home-away-from-home burgh we have (from one end to the other):
The School (K-12)
The cemetary
House of worship
Art Gallery
Hardware store
Lawyer’s office
Deli/convenience store
Laundromat
Oil/excavation/construction business
Post Office
Town Hall
Bank
Library
Professional building
Volunteer Fire Dept. & Rescue squad
Fairground
Tansfer station (the dump)
regular folks Garage
road manintenance/municipal Garage
small outbuildings business
Gas station/convenience store
To be honest, I don’t even know where the local law enforcement office is. There’s a DEP (dep’t of environmental protection) office with all the important-looking vehicles that administers the watershed that I’m in, but I don’t think they would have the jail.
I lived in a town that had a population of less than 100. We had a post office, a convience store/gas station/deli, a water treatment plant, 4 churches and a hunt camp.
Going west to east and zig-zagging across the street, these were the businesses along the main drag in my home town (population 776 according to the sign) when we moved there in the early 1970s:
Paint/glass store
Bank
Fire station
Liquor store
Meat distributor
Hardware store
Two corner gas stations
Furniture store
Restaurant
Barber shop
Drug store (the store my mom and dad owned)
Library/City Hall
Restaurant
Post office
Hotel (which had been abandoned but now serves as offices)
Tavern
Small supermarket
The “junk store” as my sister and I called it
Feed store
Town hall/grange
Gas station
The town has since grown exponentially and hardly any of the businesses listed are still the same. As my parents retired early this year, the drug store has now joined the line-up of businesses whose storefronts and types of businesses have changed.
Just once, in some Western parody like Blazing Saddles I’d love to see a crane shot pulling back and up to show the rooftops of the town (maybe like in High Noon where we see Gary Cooper standing in the street all by himself) and further back to see the road into town, and maybe the railroad tracks and there on the outskirts of town…
