My town was so small, the Mayor had to leave the City Limits, to have enough room to change his mind.
Homer & Jethro must have known about this. (“Hart Brake Hotel”)
Are you talking about the one in Vermont? If so, I lived there too in the 90’s. The general store had a few of everything - several movies to rent, snowboots in a few random sizes, a couple of rifles for sale and they made really good sandwiches on demand. The Skunk Hollow Tavern was the main attraction and is still going strong. I didn’t even have a street address, mailing address, phone of any sort or internet connection when I lived there. It was awesome.
My goodness, some of you folks lived in major metropolises.
Another datum from my town: The graduating HS class could be counted on one hand. (The lower classes would be bigger, but finishing HS wasn’t a priority in a place like that.)
The grade school classes were doubled up: one teacher for 7-8th grade, etc. and still had a better student-teach ratio than most places.
7 man football. All the HS boys played all sports except the kid with the bad leg who was team manager. But still went undefeated all the way to the state semis one year.
Oh, and given the remoteness and small population, that meant the USAF had a bombing range nearby. Mock dogfights, sonic booms, etc. Once in a while there was an accident. Came across an article about the third dummy bomb in a few months landing in a the next town over. Hit somebody’s well.
Once, a missile went off course. Lot’s of trucks, sirens, etc. A cloud of smoke outside of town. No one allowed near the site until it was all cleaned up.
Try living in a place where the government doesn’t care if they blow you up because, hey, who’s going to notice?
Yep, in VT. But the general store is in Hartland, not Hartland 4C. To this day, Hartland 4C hasn’t gotten any bigger than when I lived there other than having an actual post office building. Skunk Hollow still the only thing to do without leaving there.
I lived on the Hartland-Brownsville Rd. And the big scandal of my time was they converted from RR to street names and MISNAMED one of the local roads. Ogden’s Mill got named Jennyville and Jennyville got named some other name… The HORRORS!
Oh boy, you are bringing up pleasant memories. I loved that place and was only forced to leave through extreme coercion. That is an odd part of the world that really isn’t that far from several big cities but is a world away from the typical U.S. I moved there intentionally because of graduate school but the real reason was that I loved the Newhart Show as a kid and promised myself that I would live in Vermont as soon as possible. I did that and they were not kidding. It is almost exactly like that to this day and bless them for it. Vermont and New Hampshire are still my favorite states. As soon as global warming kicks in a little more, I may move back there.
Tell me about it, I lived very close to this “Fatal Idaho reactor meltdown”. Sitting in school watching the “turtle duck and cover” video, while seeing the reactor out the window was always a bit unnerving.
I HATED living in Vermont as a kid. Even now, I am happy enough that my visits are typically less than 4 days. Pretty. But only in small doses.
Someone would be muttering about Mr So and So driving his cattle up Temple Street during wet weather. He wanted to dry off their hooves a bit on the tarmac but of course there would be cow pats everywhere.
Where do you live now?
Shagnasty, Starks? Merryville? If so I grew up just across the line. Anyway…
When I was in college the grocery store got new ice cream coolers and it made the front page of the paper.
I’m trying to guess what’s about that distance, less than 2000 people, and still in the Chicagoland TV market. Gardner or Mazon might fit the bill but both are closer to Chicago than 87 miles. But it’s easier to say Chicago suburbs than Illinois cornfields.
The first town I grew up in was a “suburb” of Chicago that had a population of 1500-2000 when I was growing up, now it’s about 7500.
The next town was a small town in the rural west that had a town population of about 3500 when I was growing up and now it’s about 3600. It had one stoplight when I was there, now there are either five or six (can’t remember).
My graduating class was considered huge with 70 kids. The class after mine had 38.
The first house I lived in was in in Rimpton (population 212) but I’ve spent most of my life in or near big cities.
A little further north than that but I know those towns as well. Mine is Logansport, LA. It was founded as a neutral territory back when Texas was an independent country. Outlaws escaped just across the border whenever they got into too much trouble on the Texas side of the border. It has the only known international boundary mark within the U.S. on my family’s land and the only survivor of the Alamo, Moses Rose, is buried there. The fact that it was a haven for ne’er-do-wells explains explains a lot of people that I grew up with. They were the direct descendants of people on the run.
Once again the dope shows how unique I’m not.
I expected to be one of the FEW people to have spent any significant time in a town of less than a thousand people. The town I spent the last few years of my childhood in has never broken a thousand people. The max was ~900 in the 1920’s. It’s dying a slow death, down to about 250 now, and I won’t miss it at all.
My hometown was so small it had a “You are now entering” and “You are now leaving…” sign. The kicker? They were the same sign!
My hometown was so small, the local power plant was a Sears Die Hard!
My hometown was so small, if you called a wrong number, they’d give you the right one.
My hometown was so small, they had to annex property so we could eat foot long hot dogs.
My hometown was so small, you gave directions using “the stop sign” as a reference…
(Wocka wocka!)
I didn’t live in a town at all.
Where we lived when I was born was on a farm nothing but hills and woods and fields and my uncle’s trailer in sight. It was about 10 miles to the nearest small town. It has/had a population of a few hundred and no red lights.
When I was 5 or so we moved into a new house about 10 miles away, no close neighbors and nothing but woods and hills in sight. That was about 15 miles to the nearest small town. That town had a population of a few thousand and one red light.
We used to tell our college friends “Now, don’t think all there is to do back home is sit around and watch the stop lights change… because we don’t have any.”
Now there are two. And a couple of parking meters. Place has really gotten gentrified.
Was there a GREEN light?