Currently in a little joint of 4 000 000 souls, but I have lived in a place with a population of 250, and that was including a lot of outlying farms (in town would have been only about two-thirds that). Interesting place to be.
I liked the people and I liked the vibe of the town, but I disliked the lack of privacy. I’ve never been much of a gossip or anything - this isn’t because I’m particularly morally pure, but rather because gossip bores me senseless, and I forget it before I can pass it on - but I disliked having neighbours standing unexpectedly in the living room when I walk out of the shower, because they’d come to “bring me some pumpkins” or some bloody thing, and I disliked not being able to be rude to them because they were doing me a good turn. I did appreciate the great people, but some days I needed to get in touch with my urban don’t-even-make-eye-contact surly grump, and these smiling first-name-basis people wouldn’t let me!
A few months ago I read River Town, by Peter Hessler. It’s a book about his experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer in China. Very interesting and funny, I highly recommend it. Anyway, he mentions several times how remote and small his town is - only 200,000 people!
Okay, maybe by Chinese standards that’s small, but come on! He can come visit me and see what being a volunteer in an actual small town is like. Even people I don’t know say “Hello!” to me on the street because everyone knows that I’m the English Girl. Yes, I’m really American, but as faras a lot of people are apparently concerned, anyone who speaks Angliski is from Anglia and that’s final.
By the way, Pavel Banya is officially a city. The Bulgarian government designates all towns as either cities or villages, and we are a city. If you call it a village they will get really offended.
I don’t think I’ve ever been to Centerville. I’m in the southwest corner of the state in Tracy, about 20 miles from Marshall. I say Marshall because you might actually have heard of that one. We have lots of those “don’t blink or you might miss something” towns in this area. The SUV-driving yuppies around here mostly live in Marshall. That town is really growing. They even have a Starbucks now, something I never would have imagined growing up.
I grew up in Great Falls, Montana until I was 13. Then I was sent to Sacramento, CA.
I had a bit of culture shock, but I survived.
After I graduated, I moved back to Montana, to a VERY small town called Choteau (pop: about 1700 while I was there). I lived there for a year, and managed to get out before drugs pretty much gutted the town.
I moved back to Sac, and just recently moved from there to Vandergrift, PA. Which has a population of about 5000.
I’m not having culture shock this time, but I am really missing certain aspects of larger city living, like a 24 restaurant and such.
One thing that this pattern has given me is a deep annoyance with people who refer to Sacramento as a “Small Town”, or the much more dreaded and annoying “Cow Town”. Having grown up in small towns, and lived in much smaller ones, people are always surprised to find out what the difference is.
Yes, I was rather surprised to see the Starbucks in Marshall Minnesota too! But it IS a college town…
Growing up in South Dakota (years ago) gives “small town” a new meaning. The population of the 10th largest city is something like 7000. Visiting my home town means everyone knows who you are and where your car is parked or driving every minute, especially if you’re from out-of-state. Nevermind I don’t recognize anyone in the hometown paper after 30 years away.
Perhaps a topic for another thread: this small-town weekly newspaper had a subscriber who moved to Florida. Their Florida neighbors would visit and chat and took up reading the paper to catch up on the small town news. The original subscriber eventually died, but the Florida neighbors decided to keep up the subscription so they could keep track of everyone in a town (and state) they’ve never been to! It was their real-life version of a soap-opera in progress.
I grew up in a town with between 3-4 thousand people. Context made all the difference in how we viewed it. Not that far away was the “big” city of 30,000 (which is where I live now), but in the other direction were towns that were thousands smaller than my town.
Where I am is nice; a sense of anonymity, but if you’re active in the community and socially it’s very easy to run into people you know all the time.
Funny story actually. Last night I was out with my girlfriend and a group of her friends. It was getting late and the entourage was breaking up. I had decided to just make it a solo night, so I said I was tired and was going to head home, see ya tomorrow. Well, I got a text from a buddy I hadn’t seen in a while asking if I wanted to join him for a drink at the pub across the way. I was up for one more, but I was tired and figured it’d be easier to just continue with the “plan” of saying good night, heading home, and just making a detour back to the pub.
Long story short, kissed my girlfriend good night on the corner by the pub, we went our separate ways, and then I turned around and went into the pub for a drink.
Turns out that a very casual friend of mine (guy I play in pit bands with; see him probably two times a year for a week at a stretch) and a friend of his were sitting in a window seat, identified me in the dark, cheered me on when I kissed my girlfriend, then saw me come back to the pub and thought, “did he just blow that girl off!? It can’t be!” And it was. And they saw it all. It was funny enough of a story that I e-mailed my girlfriend about it this AM.
So, it just goes to show that even 30,000 is not large enough to get lost in, unless you’re trying. I try a minor deception at 11PM on a Thursday night, and two guys I sort of know are watching and catch me in the act!
Where are you from in South Dakota if you don’t mind? Being way over in the southwest corner of MN and closer to South Dakota than the Twin Cities, we go to South Dakota a lot. My husband is planning a prairie dog hunting trip there in a few weeks.
I’ve heard similar anecdotes about our newspaper. People really seem to get a kick out of small-town news for some reason. Around here, people just complain that “there’s never anything in it,” yet they’re the first to call the newspaper office when the paper’s half an hour late getting back from the printer.
I live in a small town in Louisiana of about 500 people. The entire parish is pretty much like one small town. Everyone knows who I am, even people I don’t know. When I lived in Pennsylvania, the town I lived in most of my time there had about 20,000 people and that was amazing to me. The fact that it took less than an hour to get to a city as big as Philadelphia from where we lived completely blew my mind, since back in Louisiana, we had to travel for an hour just to get to a “city” of 45,000 people. Also, had I gone to high school here, my graduating class would have been less than twenty. At my high school in PA, the graduating class was nearly 3,000.
My dad went to high school in Tracy and grew up on a farm on the north side of Lake Shetek. My grandma grew up in Currie. Dad graduated about 1950 and soon moved away, but I still get up into that neck of the woods every few years. I also have relatives in Marshall, Jackson, etc.
Yes it is, as a matter of fact. I work there. I’ve been out to Lake Shetek a couple of times this week and go to Currie quite often too.
Now let’s all join hands and sing, “It’s a Small World After All.”
Himself does this. We don’t even live in town, but the town which we claim has one stop sign, no grocery store, and a main street which can be backed onto without checking for traffic. I think the last population count was several hundred.
If we drive through town and see a blue truck, he is compelled to tell me whose it is. If he doesn’t know immediately, he’ll go through his mental rolodex, “Well, I think Jim Tuttle’s son was buying a truck last month – wonder if it’s him?” until he can find an answer that suits him. (Frighteningly, he’s usually proven right.) If he can’t figure it out, it bothers him for a very long time. He has been known to call people up and ask them who’s driving that new blue truck in town.
And if he runs into someone with a vaguely familar name, he is not content until he has plumbed the depths of their ancestry and found a name he knows. Then he remembers it, while forgetting everything else about the person, including their first name. So he’ll see them again in five years and say, “Oh! You’re Molly Hansen’s second-cousin-once-removed’s nephew!”
I grew up on a a farm. The nearest town (about 3 miles away) was Chesterville, Ohio. The 2000 census shows a population of 193. Our mailing address was Cardington, Ohio. 2000 census says population is 1849. Although Cardington was actually about 10 miles away.
The county I grew up in had a population of 31,628 in 2000. Not a very diverse place either, 98.37% white.
I get the same thing in my old Louisiana stomping grounds (my hometown’s population was around 2,400, though). Half the time, people mistake me for my brother, who still lives there–not too surprising, as everyone got us mixed up when we were both in residence.
The odd thing is that the bumping-into-people-you-know effect isn’t confined to the small town, where it would make sense. I’ve run into people from my hometown unexpectedly in all sorts of odd places. It’s a bit disconcerting to be walking alone down a trail in a forest a couple thousand miles from home and hear a familiar voice call your name, or to bump into someone you know from your little hick burg in a crowded bar on the other side of the country.
I never really thought 300 was small, since we were close to the suburbs - even when it was five miles for milk or gas. And because I knew people who live in seriously rural towns where you did have a graduating class of 20 - and that was only because kids rode the bus for an hour every morning to get to school.
That reminds me, my address growing up was P0 Box 9, Logansport, La. We lived on about 100 acres and couldn’t get mail delivered directly. Someone in the family had that address since time began. Othe family members had PO Box 4 etc.
