I and one other doper grew up in the middle on no-where. The nearest town (May, Id) had a population of 23, and they were all at the bar. Our 3 room elementary school wasn’t even in town, it was at the other end of the valley where a mining town, (long abandoned since the end of WWII) had once stood. So the school and the mormon church were surrounded by rotting buildings. We had a large class, and in 6th grade there was 4 of us.
The nearest real town (Challis, Id) (and high school) was about 45 minutes away, and it has a population of 900 people. The nearest stoplight was an hour away (Salmon, Id) and yes, for drivers ed we drove to Salmon so that we could practice driving through the only stop light in town. The next closest stoplight? According to google earth, 130 miles away, or about 3 hours drive.
Needless to say, everyone knew everyone! It drove me crazy, but I do have some funny stories. My favorite is when I was about the summer before I left Challis to go to High School in Boise. Some friends and I went rafting on the river about a week or so before school was supposed to start. This was before cell phones came to Custer county of course. Well, it turns out that my school started a week earlier than we thought, and I actually had to be in school the next day.
My mom, who was in Boise, called my dad. He didn’t know where I was, so he called my best friends mom, and she called … etc etc. Well, by the time we finished rafting and was driving into town, I was pulled over twice by people who saw me and told me to go home a pack, I had to drive to Boise for school the next day. I got gas, and the lady in the gas station gave me the message. I dropped off my friends at their home, and I got the message. And finally, I was driving out to our place outside town, and got stopped by 2 more people who flashed their lights and pulled me over. The entire town knew that I had to get packed and go to Boise, and they all wanted to make sure I knew!
I spent most of my childhood in Rochester, MI back when it had quite a bit fewer than 5,000 people on about 1 1/4 square miles. Technically, I was in Avon Township, with even fewer people on the 35 square miles surrounding Rochester, but I lived close enough to walk into town on sidewalks. I watched the township as it was overwhelmed by subdivisions, (mine being about the second or third built in the mid-1950s), but got out before Avon became the city of Rochester Hills with nearly 70,000 people while the “village” of Rochester, itself, is up to around 11,000.
It would be interesting to tour the area, now, with one of the 69,000 immigrants, pointing out the former locations of orchards, barns, and sledding hills.
When I was kid, I could be anonymous, but I could not go anywhere with my Dad or Mom without them running into at least three or four acquaintances or friends.
Now, the three townships on the southern tier of Geuaga County (excluding Parkman in the far east) cover about 74 1/2 square miles with around 18,000 people, but all our stores are clumped together in Bainbridge in the far west (next to Cleveland’s urbanized county), yet I only rarely run into neighbors or folks from church or the kids’ schools when I am shopping: it is still much larger than my experience growing up.
I grew up in Yuma, Colo., population 2,000. The town was so small both city limit signs were on the same post. We used to go down to the hotel to see who checked out the room. Electric razors were prohibited because they made the street lights dim. (Can I get a rim shot here?)
Seriously, my father was a policeman in Yuma when I was a kid, and one night as he was walking Main Street checking the doors of businesses, he heard a clicking sound coming from up the street. He began to investigate, and the clicking got louder as he approached Third Avenue. At the intersection, it seemed to come from overhead. He looked up. The clicking sound was the town’s only traffic signal changing. It was so quiet at 11 p.m. he could hear the traffic light changing nearly a half-block away.
That reminds me a an absolutely true story that I don’t like to tell to people I know because it can get a bad reaction. My family was like the 1st family of my town and we weren’t trashy at all but we were dysfunctional and eccentric in that small town Southern way. We owned the biggest store on mainstreet that went back to about 1900. The town only has one straight mainstreet and had three traffic lights. Two were clearly necessary to let people make left turns into neighborhoods but the 3rd was a pointless annoyance and people always complained about it.
One night, the burglar alarm went off at 2 am at our store and it auto-dialed our house. My father jumped out of bed to go down and see what was happening. My father was (is?) an alcoholic and he is always armed because he was kidnapped at almost killed at age 17 in a bizarre tale of mistaken identity. The perpetrator went to prison for life but my father always had his .44 magnum within reach at all times. When my father reached the pointless 3rd red light in town at 2 am, he saw not a soul in sight as was typical yet the light was red. Being a law abiding citizen that he is, he stopped for that red light, got furious at the absurdity of it all, got out and opened fire at it so that it glowed its last beacon to the world.
The town was saved and they never replaced the light. That is how Logansport became a two red light town.
As of 2000, the population of the largest town in our 500 square mile county was 1,401. We have no Wal Mart, no Lowes or Home Depot, no Applebees, no Starbucks.
Nothing. The town I grew up in has 20. And that is including the church that a co-worker bought and converted into a house.
You folks talking about a small town with a population of 10,000 do not know what you are talking about. When I left the town I had been living in for 14 years to go to college, the population dropped to 69. It has gotten smaller since. And there were smaller places within 10 miles.
There was 80 in my high school graduating class. But then our school district was made up of half of the county outside the county seat.
Last year, I lived in a village of about 50 people, mostly blood relatives. Now, I live in the county seat, which has a whopping 1,300 people in it. The whole county has a population of 16,000.
Before this? I lived in a “small town” of 15,000 on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Since it was part of the metropolitan area I never really felt that its claims of small town atmosphere really counted. Now I have confirmation. It’s nothing like truly living in the boonies like I do now.
My girlfriend went to school with 19 other students, K through 12. Three of them were her siblings :eek: . One room, one teacher the whole time and she was the only one in her graduating class.
Yeah, I remember seeing my first black person (besides on TV) on an airplane when I was 12 or so. Scared me for a second because I was worried that I’d get hit with some sort of racist dislike of the fellow (given that as a white person, and as everyone who watched TV know in the 80s knows, all white people secretly dislike black people though they pretend not to.) But nope, it appears that I’m a white person who couldn’t care one way or another.
