I’ve always lived in large heavily populated areas and wondered what growing up in a small town would be like.
How small was your town and what was it like growing up there.
My home town was so small that…
What do you mean by “small”? I grew up in a town of around 15,000 people in suburban western Connecticut. We were surrounded by other similar towns. So I wouldn’t call it “small” by like Midwestern farm town standards. But it felt pretty small.
We had one big park.
Everyone went to the same high school (although we did bus in a handful of kids from some of the real small towns that were too small to have their own high school.
We didn’t have a McDonalds or any other major fast food chain (we did have a Subway shack though.
There were 3 large malls within 30-45 minutes drive.
We had a couple of regular hang-outs in town, including a Greek all-night diner, a drive-in truck stop diner and a local chain restaurant.
Strip mall parking lots tended to be a bit of an “attractive nuisance” for the sort of kids who liked to get drunk/stoned in strip mall parking lots.
You really needed a car to get around. Kids would bike places before they could drive, but if you were visiting a friend across town, it really felt like a grueling 2 hour odyssey through a suburban wasteland.
In generally, growing up there just really felt like not having anything to do. You sit around your house watching TV until you get bored. Then you call up some buddies and hang out at their place watching TV or playing Tecmo football until that gets boring. Then when you get older, you go to house parties or out of the way spots to hang out and get drunk. Eventually you go away to college or join the military, but then you come back during breaks along with everyone else who moved away and hang out with people who are still there.
It had a couple of Naval bases, two Naval Air Stations, a Marine base, an international airport, some municipal airports, a stadium, a bunch of aerospace companies… Yeah, I lived in San Diego until I was 15. 
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I still remember in 1968 when we got our second stop light. The mayor made a speech and everything.
The town I grew up in had a census of less than 400 when I lived there (70’s and 80’s) and has grown to about 12000 now. What I remember is that it was a nice quiet place but close enough to a big city to have all the amenities needed. It was small enough that I was known for my lemonade stands, selling veggies from the garden and such from the time I was 4.
You had stop lights?!? That’s major urban centre, man!
My Connecticut hometown was and is so small that the fire department is all-volunteer. And it’s financed via a carnival held at the end of July every year. (Plus a magazine recently voted it the second-most boring town in Connecticut. That’s gotta be some kind of feat, given that Connecticut is among the most boring of states.)
Juneau, AK had a population of about 5,000 when I was a boy. We left there when I was ten, and moved to Anchorage, which had about 60,000 at the time.
I grew up in such a small town, there were only two gay bars on Main Street.
(The third one is technically a gay nightclub.)
My hometown was so small John Wayne came to the grand opening of the Tom Mix museum.
I grew up in a suburb of a metro area that was around 300k. Not an urban environment by any means but certainly not small.
I did spend a good chunk of most summers in my youth at my grandparents retirement home in northern Michigan. The entire township was sub 2k population. The small town that they officially lived in didn’t have a stoplight till I was in high school. It was probably close to half a mile down the dirt trail from my grandparents cabing to get to the mail box on the main road. They had one neighbor in a cabin by them on the dirt road, with that couples son and his family in a mobile home out near the road. That was pretty much the whole neighborhood. TV was spotty depending on the weather for all but one channel. Things were different.
Our mailing address was a city of 40000, but we were about 5 miles out of town at the end of a dirt road. Now there’s a big shopping center about a mile away, and the city limits have moved almost to my parents’ house.
A couple hundred people. A kid could walk all over town and no one thought twice about it.
Once in a while the town would be flooded by sheep. Sheep everywhere! And then they were gone. Just a few Basque sheepherders and their dogs but thousands of sheep.
Our property was fairly big for being “in town”. So each year the local Rodeo Princess would use one of our fields to practice her riding for the County Rodeo. If that doesn’t sound small-towny, I don’t know what does.
They announced they were closing the school and it was a long bus ride to the next town. So we left. As did others. But strangely the town never evaporated all that much.
One stop light, 900 or so people.
The town used to be a lot different. Before all the schools consolidated, it had its own K-12 school. By the time I went, the school was only K-5. And after my second grade year, it closed entirely and a new consolidated school opened nearby. The school was built in 1909, it was gorgeous on the inside, and I’m glad I got to spend a few years there. It was scheduled to be demolished, but was burned down by vandals not long after.
We had to go to the post office to pick up our mail from a PO Box. People used to do all their grocery shopping in town. But the small grocery store was struggling by the time I was a kid. There was no longer a barber shop…the hardware store closed. It was the same story as a lot of small towns. But we still had a baseball team…a community pool. It was still a great place to grow up, in retrospect.
There was a town of 30,000 people just 10 minutes away. An even larger city was just 30 minutes away, home to a major world class university…so we didn’t really grow up isolated all the time, it was a nice quiet place to call home, and the “modern world” was not far away.
EDIT: Rural Indiana, by the way.
We moved a lot when I was a little kid, but when I was 12 we stayed in one town until I was an adult, so i consider that town to be my “hometown”. And it was a small Midwestern farm town- 1200 people. Three towns went to my high school and there were still only 103 kids in my graduating class. One stoplight, and it blinked at night. When my mom was about 40, she had overdue library books and the librarian called her mom, my grandmother, to tell on her. I tried shoplifting with my friend once in a store in my town, and nobody stopped us- they just called our mothers about it before we even got home.
Also, if you wanted to send someone a letter and didn’t have their address, no problem- you could just put their name and the town and it would get to them.
I grew up in a small rural area in So Cal. This was back in the 1940s and 1950s. The town was actually a crossroads as far as the business area went; there were about 5 commercial operations, with the bar being the most permanent. The others included a home dry goods (cloth, buttons and such), a grocery, a gas station, and a drug store. There was also a community church/fire station building and a very small lending library. At the north end of town was an elementary school. The 4-5 blocks of homes completed the urban area. All else was citrus orchards and sage brush. We lived on the fringe of the town on the edge of an orange grove.
It is now part of the greater LA urban area sprawl now, even though it was about 40 miles to the center of LA when I was a kid.
That town I grew up in is apparently so small it doesn’t merit a Wikipedia entry.
And we lived a couple of miles outside of town.
My hometown in Vermont had a population of about two thousand humans and probably a similar number of cows.
No stoplights, then or now, and a single K-8 school. My ‘graduating’ 8th grade class was bigger than the average - it had about 35 kids in it. The town has one convenience store, one auto mechanic, and back in the old days it had a gas station, but it went out of business while I was in college.
I grew up in a number of towns, in a number of states, with a number being a value greater than one. Therefore I don’t have a single place I can point to as being the one spot I unambiguously spent my childhood, but I can point to the town I was born, where I lived until I was seven.
Du Quoin, IL has a population around 6,000, and had a population around 6,000 when I was born. It’s small enough that the traffic light blinks yellow at night. It’s small enough that the only cause for traffic jams is when there’s a big long coal train taking the track which runs through town, and it can be fifteen minutes before it passes completely. It has a park in the middle of town with a covered bandstand, and it has an Elks clubhouse with a huge fake elk head above the door with light bulbs screwed into sockets on its antlers. The lights go from being just white to multicolored around Christmastime. (That elk head might be gone now; I can’t find it.)
It’s pretty small.
I grew up in a suburb of Chicago with a population of about 12,000. There was a lot of vacant land and even farm land around, but also lots of other suburbs. My grandparents lived on the North Side, so we drove into Chicago quite often.
There were a couple grade schools, one high school, no McDonald’s restaurant, and a real small-town feeling.