I lived for a while in a KS town that took up a collection and borrowed a farm truck to gravels main streets. In another - NE- my son bragged he could visit every house on hallowe’en.
My home town right on the Louisiana side of the Louisiana/Texas border was about 1,300 people when I grew up there in the 70’s and 80’s but has since swelled to about 1,600. We lived outside of town though on about 100 acres of our own surrounded by several thousand acres of woods owned by people we knew (obviously) so I had all of the woodland you could want all to myself growing up. I loved to camp and work on projects on my own so I would just disappear into the woods for multiple days at a time when I felt like it. I even built my own log cabin deep in the woods and stayed there by myself or with friends as a retreat.
We only had 2 1/2 TV stations (we only got NBC when it was cloudy) but we did have a fully stocked catfish pond, dirt bike, a pistol range, rifle range and really fancy skeet shooting range that I could use any time I wanted. I always got a little baffled when people would come to visit from Dallas or some other huge place and ask what there was to do. LOOK AROUND! There was everything good to do and most of them started to get it after a couple of days.
The downside was that the crime rate was astoundingly high especially during the late 80’s for such a small town. The town is roughly 50/50 black and white and we somehow got our own Crips chapter and everything that goes along with that but there were other groups ranging from pure white trash to common rednecks that also had a tendency towards violent crime. I seem to know a disproportionate amount of murderers, murder victims and other serious felons because the town produced so many and I knew everyone in it and still do for the most part.
It was an interesting place to grow up overall and I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything but I am thankful that I now live far away sometimes when I read my Facebook feed and see that history there seems to be stuck in some type of time loop and a lot of it is really bad.
Grew up a few miles outside of a small town in upper Sacramento valley–like some Midwest folks might say, “a nice place to be from”
Couldn’t wait to get out.
About 5,000 according to the census data but that really doesn’t tell the full story. 95% of the people lived in 5% of the land the borough entailed; the rest was really rural. My front street was like 9 miles long for 6 houses.
1-st grade - 3rd Military housing out side Falmouth Mass a popular resort town. very, very crowded in the summers
4th and 5th grade the town had 8,500 people. At the time it didn’t seem small. The county seat and had a fairly large downtown. Multiple banks, a couple car dealerships and several grocery stores. It had consolidated schools that brought in kids from all over the county.
6th grade up 24,000 Also the county seat, and it had a much bigger school and high school
Every new fast food restaurant opening in my home town is a big deal. We have a decent selection there now, but it was a big deal when Arbys showed up.
I’d love to retire and move back to a small town. I dream of it. But rural medical care is terrible in my state. Big cities mean living near big hospitals. The best doctors. So I reluctantly will stay put. Its only a 8 min drive from my house to two different hospitals. That can be really important as I approach my sixties.
First, about three miles on a dirt road from a village of 1500. Then we moved to about a half mile outside a village of about 250 or 300. I bought a house in a village of about 1200. All in Ohio.
Honestly, we lived outside of “town,” so it wasn’t really like growing up in a small town. More like growing up in the woods, or on a farm.
My hometown population maxed out at 3001 back in the 70s. Now, about 2600. When I was a kid, it had everything anyone needed within a five-minute bike ride: banks, grocery, hardware store, auto parts, dime store, two pharmacies, an ice cream parlor, other restaurants. Then, GM left.
Now, it only has a grocery and a Dollar General. Restaurants are still there, including a Dairy Queen. There is a DAV bingo parlor in the old hardware store location. Fortunately, it does have an interstate exit with a couple truck stops, a Mc D, and a Subway restaurant.
by small town, I mean to say about pop 1200
Grew up in a town of about 600. School was one building, K-12; I had 17 people in my graduating class (I was ranked third).
Growing up in a small town has advantages and disadvantages. I have no doubt that I received a better education because of the smaller class sizes; on the other hand, it couldn’t really offer much in the way of electives (like foreign languages or AP coursework).
Knowing everybody’s business, and knowing that everyone knows your business, is good and bad.
2500
I moved to Minneapolis, population 370,000
I now live in Los Angeles, population 3.884 million.
My kid’s high school (9-12) enrollment was close to 5,000.
The town I grew up in had 1500 people and no stoplights (we did have one flashing red light that was the same as a stop sign). Today the town has about 10,000 people. My high school graduating class was about 70 kids.
I grew up in several small towns all over Northern California. The place I was born in had a population of 12,250 when I was born. Other towns had populations of about 5000, 4000, 1500, 8000 and 2500 till we moved to the San Francisco Bay Area when I was in 8th grade. The city I lived in there, and where I graduated from high school, had a population of about 72,000.
Grew up in a small country town of 1000 people inland Australia right on the Murray River.
No public transport, 4 pubs plus a licensed Golf club and lawn bowls club, no traffic lights at all, 2 primary schools (1 for the Catholics and the other for everyone else) and the district high school 20km away.
Grew up swimming in the river in summer and playing football in winter (I sucked at Cricket)
Population now is over 2000 people. A lot of the mexican terrorists (AKA tourists who come up from Victoria during summer) have retired up there from Melbourne. Still like going up there for a visit but don’t know if I could ever go back and live there again. I left home and moved to Melbourne when I was 19.
My home town had fewer than 15,000 people when I was growing up, but the number is misleading – the borders we shared with other towns had continuous housing. The boundaries, if you didn’t already know them, weren’t clear. We were part of the Boston-Washington megalopolis. You could hop on a bus downtown and be in midtown Manhattan in less than an hour.*
*sadly, no longer true. Not only has traffic made the trip longer, but the bus no longer runs from downtown, dammit. You have to drive to a garage a couple of towns over (it’s too far to walk in any reasonable amount of time)
My town (from ages 0-7) was about 6000 people located 20 miles or so from Akron, Ohio. Had a town square and my street ended in a dead-end, the hill for sliding on in winter was just across the street, and school was a 10 minute walk. It may be that
Ages 7-10 was a prototypical ‘bedroom’ community just outside Ft. Wayne, where all the houses looked more or less alike and everybody had to take buses to schools because the local infrastructure wasn’t in place yet. It was OK, but there were no hills or other activities.
55 years later, and I sometimes think of moving back (once I’ve retired) to that town (now about 16000) where I was born. It’s not really practical or necessary, but…
^ This, except the current population of my home town is now about 20,000
nm