I was born and spent my early years in a tiny little blip of a village called Roseland, IN. At one time it had been a free-standing village, but over the years it and its fellow village a mile away, Indian Village, had been swallowed up by the large metro area surrounding them. Both Roseland and Indian Village each still had their own post offices and were, legally, still separate entities. At heart, though, I was an urban girl.
I did get a taste of small town life, though, when visiting my grandparents in a tiny farming community in NE Iowa. There were 417 residents the last I knew. My mother, who was raised there, had 47 people in her high school. The town had one gas/service station, one drug store, a post office, a diner, and two bars, one on each end of the two block long Main Street. There was no grocery store, but there was a farm market once a week in the bank (the one bank) parking lot where you could supply yourself with almost anything you needed that wasn’t non-perishable. There was a library of sorts - an elderly resident had donated the ground floor of her home to a group of volunteers who maintained a small inventory of books. There were also “Monkey” Wards and Sears catalog stores that were always busy. There were two churches - Congregationalist and Presbyterian - and one ‘professional building’ that housed one lawyer, one accountant, and an osteopathic doctor. For a dentist (and a grocery store), you had to travel to the next town over, a booming metropolis with 1200 residents.
I loved it there. I would ride my bicycle all over the countryside with two paperbacks and a couple of apples in my bike basket. I had an old straw hat against the hot summer sun, and would park my bike somewhere along the side of a road and read for hours. When I’d get thirsty or need to use the facilities, I’d just knock on the door of the nearest farmhouse. Everyone knew my family, and thus me, so there was no worry about not being let in.
I grew up in a town of about 4,000 people in north central Kansas. By local standards, it was quite a busy place as we had probably a eight or ten other towns (with a few dozen or maybe a few hundred people per town) within a 20 mile radius. Our town was the county seat, had the only high school, the only theater and had the only real grocery stores.
I’m well aware that ‘busy’ by north central Kansas standard is slightly less exciting than watching paint dry. Example: A few years ago they had a town wide party for the grand opening of their first all night convenience store.
My first paying job was driving 10 ton grain trucks into town to unload at the elevator. I had just turned fourteen years old in the mid eighties and had been driving those same trucks around my grandma’s and my uncle’s farms for the last four years. I lived in town but had I been a farm kid I probably would have been doing it by age ten. This was not at all unusual in the area at the time.
The nearest city of any size was Salina, 40,000+ people, an hour away. Oddly enough, it’s the location of the world’s largest grain elevator (In Kansas? Surely you jest?!)
My home town had about 2500 (more in the summer). Just one traffic light (that they put in when I was a kid).
My high school class was the biggest in the history of the school, with 120 in it (just had my 45th reunion), but that included people from the town next door which didn’t have a high school.
There was a potato farm across the street from me, and we were right on the water, so there was a lot of boating and swimming in the summer. It was a summer resort; the population doubled then.
My father and grandfather ran a general store in the center of town; we didn’t sell clothes or food, but just about anything else, especially appliances. I would work there in the summer, of course.
There was no movie theater; we had to drive to the next town.
We had a 1 screen movie theater that closed down while I was there, and a 1 screen theater in the adjacent city, and a drive-in. Plus a 2 screen theatre in the mall 25 miles away.
To Alpha Twit: What’s so hard to believe about what is stated in your last paragraph? I hope this does not betoken any prejudices against Kansas or Kansans.
Grew up in a small town in deep south Texas. The 1980 census pegged the population at just over 6000, although this included outlying areas and migrant workers who weren’t there year round. And, I think, some livestock.
You could walk across town in about two or three hours.
The town I live outside of now is the one I spent summers as a child running around in. It has a population of around 500 (counting people who live on farms, too). We actually live in the original town (a mile south) which is now unincorporated with a similar name. There are about 40 people living here. Most of whom I am either directly related to (siblings, their kids) or indirectly related to (my deceased BIL’s kin). Other than my family there is 1 South American Indian family and 1 Black family. There are no stoplights, 1 bank, 2 bars (used to be 3), 1 gas station (used to be 3… one of which is now the City Hall) and we still have a post office (though it runs on very short hours).
The city I grew up the rest of the year is part of 5* other communities. It had the least amount of people and the least amount of jobs. It was where the rich people moved to have a nice house. It was a very White community. To the point the first Black student I saw was in 4th grade. There was 1 Vietnamese family, 2 Hispanic families and my family (Native American). By the time I hit Middle School (6-8th grade) there were 2 Black families, a Chinese family and a 3rd Hispanic family. By High School there were a few more of each plus a few other ethnicities/religions being represented.
Today it has about 35,000 people so a wild guess going by it having grown by 2,000 people in 4 years there were probably around 25,000 people back then. Looking at current data suggests not much of a demographic shift has occurred. It’s 91% White. And it has expanded quite a bit as far as jobs go… mostly shopping malls and restaurants. And casinos.
The Quad Cities* itself has about 400,000 people living in and around it. So you have a mix of small city/big city things to do.
*It depends on who you ask as to which cities belong to the “Quad” part. And since some of the bigger cities have sprawled out one can almost include a few more towns in the count.
My elementary school was small enough that we shared teachers for 2 grades. For example, when I was in 4th grade we had 5th graders in our class, and vice-versa. Not quite a one-room schoolhouse but close enough!
9500 people or thereabouts in Sedro Woolley, WA in the 80s. About 95 in our graduating class. We had to go two towns over to get to a McDonalds or a movie theater.
We lived about 10 miles north of town. It used to be an adventure when we would go into town to do laundry or shop for groceries.
About the same. I was in a Chicago suburb that had 13,000 people but it was immediately adjacent to other suburbs of 40,000-80,000+ people. It had undeveloped land (all developed now) but no real small town feeling there; tell people that you need to go to the mall and they’d ask “which one?”
For a while in the mid 70’s I lived in the 0.67 square miles that is Kellerton, IA. Population was around 300. There was one paved road, the rest were gravel. No traffic lights, no street signs, and maybe just one stop sign. The high school building was in Kellerton, the k-12 building in Grand River, about 12 miles away. If I’d stayed there thru high school there would have been 12 in my graduating class. I see now that both schools have been demolished.
I grew up in the country, at the dead end of a dirt road, on the edge of BLM land in New Mexico (BLM is the Bureau of Land Management, basically state-owned land that is wide open nothingness). It was a couple minutes’ walk to our nearest neighbor’s house. The closest “town”, a few minutes’ drive away, was Pojoaque, which had a couple hundred people, schools for K-12, and no stop lights. When we got a Dairy Queen, it was big news in the community; before that, the only “fast food” place was Blake’s Lotaburger, the chain you saw occasionally on Breaking Bad.
We lived on a five-acre lot, which gave us lots of room to garden and raise animals. At various times, we had chickens, turkeys, goats, rabbits, geese, a horse, a mule, and even peacocks and an emu. When I was old enough to do chores, I’d feed and water the animals and collect eggs from the chickens; my mom sold eggs to the neighbors. We’d kill the chickens and turkeys in the fall and have a big chest freezer full of chickens and turkeys for months. We’d also fill the freezer, the storage room, and the root cellar with all kinds of stuff from the garden. My mom made amazing pickles. The dill growing in the garden also attracted dill worms (caterpillars), which I caught in jars a few times and fed until they cocooned and turned into butterflies.
What was it like? Not much different from anywhere else, I guess, except you’d have to either ride a bike to your friend’s house or wait for a ride. And occasionally cows and bulls would wander on to our property.
I grew up in a small southern/central California resort town (kind of a haven for rich hippies, with a lot of Hollywood people making their homes there). The main town had about 5,000 people when I was there–about 7,000 now. They don’t encourage a lot of growth. It has a street called “Signal Street” because it was a big deal when they got a traffic signal (they have a couple more now). It also has one single-screen theater.
It has about as many oak trees as people, and I used to joke when I lived there that the trees had so many rights, any day now they were going to get the vote. Far as I know that hasn’t happened yet, though.
I thought it was a pretty boring place when I was a kid, but as I get older, I’ve started entertaining fantasies of moving back some day. Not sure it’ll ever happen, but it’s a nice thought, and it would be a great place to live.
My hometown had about 2500 people when I was a kid, all of whom were tasked to keep a close watch on me and report all infractions (real or imagined) committed by me to my parents. The town had one traffic light and a constable; no police force. Fire department was all volunteer. Telephone calls were placed by turning a crank and telling “central” to whom you wished to speak. When the phone service was upgraded to dial phones, everyone had a four digit number. No door to door mail delivery; mail was picked up at post office*. One of the three gas stations had pumps that were operated by a hand crank. No bars, sales of alcohol were prohibited. Plenty of protestant churches; Catholics and Jews were not represented. Black people lived in a very closely defined area, known by all as “N” word town. One grade school, one high school; Black people had their own school; IIRC classes there stopped at the eighth grade. Segregation was strictly enforced.
*Farm families had RFD (Rural Free Delivery) addresses.
I only lived there a couple of years, but in the 1980s the Hartland 4 Corners Post Office was located in the post mistress’ living room. Every night she rolled the wall of PO boxes and postal window to the side of her LR and put it back every day. They got PO in its own building sometime in the early 90s.
My home town was so small that There was a sign coming into town that said “Welcome to Howe, Idaho population 36 people 7 dogs 1 cat” It did not lie. It was also small enough that when one building caught fire on a windy day the whole town burned down. fire
