My sister was a junior in high school, in English class, when they were talking about little bitty towns where:
You plug in your electric razor and the streetlights go dim.
They had to extend the city limits to install a telephone booth.
The one traffic light changes twice a week.
Someone asked Janice, “Well, where were you born?”
She said, “Beech Grove, Indiana.”
Everybody laughed.
She said, “It’s right outside of Indianapolis!” 
I grew up in the San Fernando Valley (part of Los Angeles), so not such a smallish town.
However, out in the hills towards Palmdale, there was a little community called Agua Dulce, so small that the sign by the road said “Entering Agua Dulce” – on both sides.
(It’s a big commuter bedroom community by now.)
Homestead, FL is where I grew up, kind of small.
I grew up in a coastal Victorian town (Australia) that boasted a population (then, 1960’s) of app 3000 people. That number would swell three or four-fold over the summer holidays as the town was a mecca for holiday-makers. Back then the town had one small street of stores, a primary school and a bus that ran just twice a day to the major town app 25km away.
I walked to school, played with friends in bushland and on the streets. We were kicked out of the house after breakfast, and wouldn’t reappear until hungry. There was no fear of child-snatchers or anything else untoward happening, as being a small town, everybody pretty much knew everyone else and adults would keep an eye out for others’ kids.
I moved back here four months ago. The town has quadrupled geographically in size, and now has more than 14k permanent residents. What is interesting is that many of the houses now are empty for most of the year. For example, it appears that the street I live in is mostly uninhabited for months on end, despite the houses being worth multi-millions of dollars. 
There’s three primary schools now and a secondary college. There’s cafes and groovy bars everywhere, there’s TWO supermarkets and even two sets of traffic lights (actually, they probably need many more sets of lights to control the manic traffic flow). The town is pretty much constantly busy, and with the warmer weather coming up, will be totally packed with holidayers and day-trippers from Melbourne…just like when I was a kid.
Is it better or worse now? I don’t know yet. 
I grew up in the country. It was a mile to the closest hard road. The nearest town was about a 20-25 minute drive. It had close to 8000 people in those days but it was already shrinking and continues to do so. There wasn’t and isn’t a lot to do in that area if you aren’t into hunting, fishing, or other woodsy activities.
I guess the population of my hometown during my childhood might have been around 15,000; these days it’s closer to 25,000 but I no longer live there.
As a teen I found it boring but increasingly busy. I longed to move to my grandparents smaller town, reasoning that there was still nothing to do, but it was more peaceful.
My partner, who grew up in a bigger area, is still amused by the six degrees of separation stuff that I encounter all the time.
Less than 400 people in my hometown; we were surrounded by corn.
I grew up here, a tiny fishing village in southern New Zealand. Here’s approximately the view we had from our living room window (actually taken from our (at the time) neighbour’s house). It had a standing population of only a couple of hundred people, though if you counted the nearby villages and townships where we commonly interacted (my High School, for example, was regional and administered a wide swathe of the local countryside) it might have reached 3000 people.
The nearest town had an inner city population of around 80k, but they also like to pretend they’re bigger by including the wider region, swelling numbers to 120k or so.
I had very few friends, most of whom were either farmers’ kids, fishermen’s kids, or, like me, families who worked at the nearby Psychiatric (Mental) Hospital. I had very few to pick from, so it was anyone you tolerated that were around your age. My school life was simple and limited, and somewhat sheltered. I never really fit in, but that has always been true.
It was a quiet idyllic life that I didn’t appreciate at the time, but it was also very isolating and remote, far away from where things happened. I like to say it was the arse end of a country at the arse end of the world. But it was the Western world, and we spoke English, and our economy was strong, with a vibrant cultural identity, so things were really quite good.
I am hoping my life will take me back to a similar peaceful bucolic retirement one day.
Small town in northern New England about 4000 people. Perhaps one mile in east to west and and perhaps 400 yards wide north to east. Back in the day, wandered all the place and beyond.
Growing up it was a depressed small community with all the small shops and machine sheds closed down. Now it is very much a desirable place to live with lots of restaurants, shops, brew pubs, etc.
I started off in a town of over 7 million but then moved to a town of only 3000 that as I grew up became just another part of the suburban sprawl known as Central Jersey. The town I grew up in started as mostly farms and woods but before I was done with High School was already over 12000. Woods I played in were developments.
As a kid there were in easy walking distance a creek, a horse farm and a large marsh where we played. There was actually a second horse farm but they didn’t let the local kids play there.
Even when we moved in though it was a commuter town and not a more insular town like the mid-west and south are famous for. So I guess it would not qualify as what people think of as a small town.
I grew up in a town of 600 people. There was absolutely nothing to do there. There was a drug store that had a grill and served food, but a bunch of old men hung out there all day so it was always too crowded. There was an ancient gas station, a bank, post office and the school. Just outside the main strip was a volunteer fire department, another gas station and community center/tiny library. The community center was just to hold events in, there was usually nothing to do there.
There was a big intersection in the middle of town with a 4-way stop and when I was about 10 it got a traffic light. All it did was flash red in all 4 directions.
My grandparents lived on a hill overlooking the main road into the town and would sit on their porch and identify the people driving the road. “That looks like Bill Johnson’s truck, he must have gotten off work early. He usually drives through an hour later.” “There goes Nancy Smith, must be going to visit her mother.”
This reminds me of a good friend from college. He insisted he was from a “suburb” of Chicago. It was a town with less than 2,000 but they got the Chicago TV stations and were covered by their weather radar so he was convinced that counted as a “suburb.”
I just checked and it is 87 miles away according to Google Maps.
I in no means am saying Pai325 wasn’t in an actual suburb… just reminded me of another small town “suburb” of Chicago I had heard of.
The population when I was growing up in the 70’s was around 2,500. It’s a village, not a city or town. It was great going to school with the same kids from pre-school-grade 12. I am still friends with one of my pre-school friends.
I was a car-hop at the drive-in when I was 15-18. The place was packed on Friday and Saturday nights. I used the tips from that job to buy my moped when I was 17, and an old antique bed when I was 18. I still sleep on that bed to this day.
I grew up just outside a small farming village of <200 people. You might have been able to draw in about 1000 people if you drew a 15 mile radius on the map. Just a few miles north of us was basically the end of people - you could walk for 30+ miles (assuming you liked forest and muskeg) without hitting a settlement. Most people were farmers, ranchers or worked at the paper mill (about 30 miles away, also the nearest (and only) city of any size, only about 30k people at the time). You’d better have liked snowmobiling and/or hunting. Pretty country, though.
Grew up on a dirt road a couple miles outside a community in Western NY of around 5000 people, which blended in with an adjacent, slightly larger city, so 5000 to 15000 depending on what you count. Only for a year or so total would I say I lived in a “classic” small town, when I lived my dad on weekends in another, smaller, town where he had a house a block from downtown, with trees and sidewalks.
For another couple years, my mom’s place was smaller apartments that were closer to town than the farm but still separated from downtown by quite a bit, and another year or so where my dad “upgraded” to a larger house to fit a larger family, and neither of these places had trees and a sidewalk.
The village had a town square, a great (and now closed) sub shop with an excellent cheesesteak, and an interesting downtown where the buildings on one side of the town square had lower floors that connected to parking lots on the other side of the main street, since it was on the side of a hill.
However, I’d like to return to NYS some day, outside of the Southern Tier and downstate, but Fredonia would be my last choice of any similarly-sized places that I’ve been to. Because it is far away from waterfalls and other interesting terrain, and I am bitter that the cheese steak shop is closed. In fact, I don’t go to Subway because there is now a Subway in Fredonia (even though I’m not sure if they had anything to do with the closure). I’m sure other large towns/small cities have changed but there aren’t any memories of former great places there.
“Hail, hail Fredonia…”
The smaller you are, the smaller the bit of town you know, even if (as in my case) it’s part of London. Gradually you get to know a bit more and are trusted to be allowed to roam a bit further, but it’s amazing in retrospect how small an area I moved around in up until about the age of 16 or 17.
…if you drove down main street at speed and blinked, you’d miss it.
Population 200, five blocks long and three blocks wide. When my large family moved in, we raised the population by 5%. Pretty much all the residents were either retired or worked in Mom & Pop businesses (lumber yard, gas station, grocer, body shop, electrician, etc.) which supported the local farmers.
I’m not sure why the distance matters- some parts of Suffolk are 120 miles away from NYC, yet Suffolk is still considered a NYC suburb.
Two different 4,000~ towns until high school years then 100,000~ and now (since college) 600,000~ and, for what it’s worth, I’m not sure if it’s true, but I like to say “I used to grow up in _____” since I don’t think I will ever finish that task. 
