Slocum Hollow.
Well, there’s a town in Missouri that fits your description fairly well. It’s called Wappapello, and I used to live there.
When people end up writing about small towns without having actually lived in them, you end up with the piece-of-shit movie “Sweet Home Alabama” instead of the all-time-great song “Sweet Home Alabama”.
Who was the founder of the town? Name it after him.
In the Finish the Western thread, the name of the town is Anderson’s Gulch.
Mount Yourneighbor
I have no reason for suggesting this town name; it was just the first (and last) one I thought of: Knocker’s Rock.
Place names … one of my favorite topics.
Stereotypical hillbilly place names like “Cooter Patch” or “Bubba’s Knob” aren’t really that common. Sure, they’re out there, but they’re the exception, not the rule.
Religious place names outside of Spanish North America are commonly associated with utopian settlements of the 1800s. A random patch of dirt in Arkansas probably won’t have a name like Leviticus or Jehrico.
Place names in some parts of the country often have a distinct sound, vocabulary and/or or cadence that closely ties it to the region. The imaginary city of Arlen, from King of the Hill, is about as perfect of a Texas place name as you’ll find. For Virginia, I’d say pick a random family name, make is posessive, and add “Ferry” to the end. For Pennsylvania, add “Forge” to any word or name. For a suburb of Cleveland, add “Heights.” For a suburb of St. Louis, pick any elegant-sounding French word. For Tennessee, add the suffix “ville” to any one or two-syllable English-language name.
Arkansas was originally explored and claimed by the French, so a bastardization of a French name for a geographic feature might work. Entering “deep forest” into a translation engine results in “forêt profonds”, so maybe … Fouray?
Cooter Patch and Bubba’s Knob should be right next to each other.
Here are some suggestions, most of which are actual towns in my general vicinity.
Bagdad (Where I live)
Cropper
Vigo
Waddy
Peytona
Bald Knob
Finchville
Elmburg
Pleasureville
New Castle
Gratz
Alton
Nebo
Drakesboro
Pembroke
Crofton
Dunmor
Dawson Springs
Yelvington
Sinking Fork
Another thought: I’ve seen many an obsolete or outdated place name used in a small town. Constantinople, Peking, Peiping, Formosa, Tokio, Persia and Siam could work. Stalingrad or Tenochtitlan probably wouldn’t.
One thing I’ve seen in the Midwestern are transplanted but deliberately mispronounced foreign place names, a classic example being Cairo, Illinois. You could lend a little bit of flavor to your town by naming it “Chardonnay,” but have it pronounced “char-DON-nee”, or “Berlin” pronounced as “burr-LINE”. Then again, “Burlein” sounds like a town in west Texas, near Angus, Lock n’ Load, Schreckenbacher, Spur, Shorthorn, and Elrod, also imaginary Texas-sounding names I picked off the top of my head.
Whoa. I’ve known two people from Ripon (a co-worker and a college classmate). If I’m not mistaken, you’re not too far from the lovely town of Delhi (pron. Dell-high) which, as we all know, is the namesake for the Indian city of New Delhi.
As far as the hick town goes…I’ve always wanted to live in Squatsville.
Flawless. It jumped out at me for some reason.
The Village?
Sorry, just seems a little familiar…
Any suggestions you get from me probably won’t be Ozarks enough, though a lot of US places are named after Irish or English towns. Where I’m from in England, there were places like “Long Wittenham Stump”, which always struck me as spooky, and a genuinely creepy village-of-the-damned hick village called “Adwell”.
I assume you’re near Frankfort KY then.
I was going to add some other names from Boyle County KY (my high school home) which resonate…
Needmore
Atoka
Junction City
Gravel Switch
Parksville
Forkland
Perryville
Tennessee Ridge
Pumpkin Run
Mitchellsburg Knob
White Oak
Good luck.
Not necessarily. It depends on who you have in mind for your narrator, but if s/he is a big-city person and has condescending attitudes about small-town people, your opening could be perfect. Particularly if your narrator discovers that these people are pretty damn smart.
Have fun with the story!
Three tiny towns near here are Hardscrabble, Florida Station, and Beauvoir Circle. Three weeks ago, I was in Gnaw Bone.
Buckhorn, and it should have an Army post nearby, possibly named Ft Leonard Wood. 
Though you’ve described Montville, I’ll have to say Cappadocia.
Blackpool