About a decade ago my co-worker/friend had to go back to her tiny home town in Nebraska for her mom’s funeral; I wanted to support her as best I could from Middle Georgia by sending a basket of pastries to her. I didn’t know what hotel she was staying at but there were only 2.
I called Hotel #1 and explained who I was looking for and what I wanted to do; they said she wasn’t staying there, but was at the other hotel and did I want that phone #?
I called the Hotel #2, asked for her and was not only put through to her room, but given her room # - unheard of even then due to guest security; when she didn’t pick up I asked to leave a message; the clerk literally went to the window to look for my friend’s rental car, came back and said she must be at the funeral home but she was checking out that day anyway to go stay at her uncle’s. Did I need that address? And did I want the bakery’s # to order the food?
Hotel #1 had already called hotel #2 about me.
So I got the bakery’s # (needless to say they didn’t need my help w/ an address at all) and then had me call back to Hotel #2 to pay for it by card, b/c they only took cash. Same business or family? Nope, just a small town.
These folks weren’t related to her, hadn’t seen her in many years AND both her parents had been in a nursing home in another city for several years, plus she went by her married name. They still knew who she was and I don’t think it was just good business sense. To me, that is peak small town.
What’s your small town experience?
I live in a small town. Your story doesn’t surprise me at all.
Here’s the first “small town” story that popped into my head:
A few years ago, Mr. Athena and I were biking on our local mountain bike trail system. He was in front of me, and suddenly stopped, got off his bike, and bent down to pick something up off the ground. It was a GPS unit, a pretty nice one, obviously fallen off someone’s bike.
There was no ID on it, and no lost & found or anything like that at the trailhead, so we just took it home with us. We wanted to get it back to the owner, but didn’t really know how. I happened to think to myself that there was a certain brewery that a lot of mountain bikers liked - this place sponsored races and such, and it had a good local following. I posted something on their Facebook page about finding a GPS on such-and-such a date/time, and the trail where we found it.
Within a couple hours, the owner contacted us, verifying it was his via the serial number. Turned out it was our eye doctor. #smalltownliving.
I visit a lot of small towns during road trips, so I don’t have more than a visitor’s impression of them. But I find the overwhelming percentage of people I meet very nice and helpful to someone who happens to be passing through.
I stop in at local museums as often as I can. I’m always impressed by the folks who take the time to volunteer and keep the artifacts and stories of the town alive.
I’ve lived both in the heart of large cities and in tiny towns. Both have their upsides and downsides. The city was big, noisy, and not particularly friendly—and this was in Portland, one the friendlier cities on the west coast.
However, the grocery stores were well-stocked and I had access to some real culture: museums, live theater, music, and people from different cultures. It made for interesting living.
Small towns lack much of that. In the above-linked thread, the small town in question (Rudyard, Montana) has no… anything, really. They have a movie theater and a nice automotive museum, but no grocery store and no ATM anywhere in town. The only restaurant is a “Grandma’s Kitchen” type of place. Everyone in town is Catholic or Lutheran, and non church goers are looked upon with a certain level of suspicion and slight derision.
But on the other hand, people are overwhelmingly friendly and willing to help each other out with the most mundane things: last second-to-last time I was there, in 2008, my cousin had asked me to stop by a local hardware store and pick up some large piece of equipment for him since I was going through town anyway. I went and paid, but couldn’t fit it in my trunk. Another farmer, who happened to be in the store at the time, offered to take the piece of equipment back to my cousin’s place because he was headed that way anyway. You don’t find that kind of friendliness unquestioning helpfulness in bigger towns or cities.
If I won the lotto I’d likely buy someplace very remote, but within not-too-bad driving distance of a least a medium-sized town. I like the small town atmosphere, but being able to do a decent grocery shopping or see a play is pretty important to me.
I’ve loved visiting/vacationing in small towns, but hadn’t thought of that as a price you’d have to pay.
I wonder how large a town has to get before it has good ethnic restaurants? We had friends who moved from one college town to smaller college town (Okay, Madison to East Lansing. Happy now?
Hopefully, Lansing has more now, but in the 80s their local “exotic” restaurant was basic Italian.
Oh, wait, I remember… just before they left a Cambodian family started an “Any Kind of Asian Cuisine You Want” spot.
ETA: Lancia, move here with your lottery winnings. A friend lives fifteen minutes outside of town on a little farm in rolling hills and can’t see her nearest neighbor. (Deerfield, WI) (Just outside Madison… with its ethnic groceries and a Trader Joe’s)
In about 6 or 8 months I’ll be looking for work, with pretty much “the whole country” as my target location. I would like to stay in the northern half of the country though… does Madison have a community college looking for freshly-minted history profs?
::Googles::
Seems Madison has a sizable higher ed presence. Intriguing…
My current town has a population of ~20K, and it’s fairly remote–the next town of any size (150K) is about 70 miles away. We have one decent Italian restraunt and a couple of passable Mexican restaurants. One or two very Americanized Chinese restraunts. And of course the usual fast food selections, Sizzler, and Applebees.
Let’s put it this way: the locals consider Red Robin the epitome of haute cuisine. I refuse to partake.
We have a decently stocked Safeway but nothing more exotic than that. We have a couple of community theaters and a couple of live music festivals during the summer, which can be fun.
It suits our needs, but I don’t particularly like it here.
I recently moved to a small town (about 1800 people). It’s in New England, which is a different kind of small town than many in America. For one thing, they have more practice at it. Some of my neighbors’ ancestors settled here in the 1700’s. No one thinks of them as special. New Englanders have more respect for education than anywhere I’ve ever lived. They don’t expect you to go to church (though I do).
I have already accumulated many a small-town story. Including when I first got here and since I never saw anybody in the forest around my house I was in the habit of walking my (dog aggressive) dog off leash. So one day, we come around the bend and there’s a lady with four dogs! All also off leash. My dog rushes out and pins one to the ground. Chaos ensues. Dog was not hurt (my guy never has actually bitten a dog in his life, just is scary). The next day I go down to the city office to pay taxes or something and the town clerk says as I introduce myself, “oh, I already know who you are and where you live. You’re the lady whose dog put Sophie on the ground yesterday.”
Today I went to the post office to get my mail (there is no mail delivery to my house) and told the postmaster sheepishly that I had forgotten the key to my mailbox. He just went and got my mail for me. He didn’t need me to tell him what box it was, and I did not expect that he would.
We are a half hour from the Pioneer Valley, with its many colleges (UMass, Amherst, Hampshire, Smith, Holyoke) and its shopping and cultural events. I have no complaints about here at all, although January is quite bleakly cold, and last year we had snow the third week of April. If that’s the price I have to pay, I’m happy to pay it.
Bolding mine. I also like small town or county museums. One of my favorites is the one in Marysville, Kansas. It’s in the building that used to be the county courthouse of Marshall County.
I work in advertising, and 15+ years ago, I had Applebee’s as a client. At one point, we got a new creative team assigned to the account, and the new art director told us that he was quite familiar with Applebee’s – he’d grown up in a small town in Oklahoma, and his parents considered Applebee’s to be the “fancy restaurant” in town.
I lived for many years in a small town in Wyoming. Each town in that area was about 25 miles away from the next small town. It was over 100 miles to the nearest mall. Applebee’s? We’d have been thrilled. Every so often, a rumor would circulate that we were getting an Olive Garden or Red Lobster, and everyone got excited, even though there was nowhere near the population base those franchises require.
But pretty regularly there’d be a letter to the editor of the local newspaper from someone passing through (almost always in summer–winters were rough, about like in Rudyard, MT) expressing gratitude for locals who helped them when their car broke down, or a wallet was lost, or someone got sick. There’s often a culture of helpfulness in small towns because isolation means people have to rely on each other.
there is a mid sized town in Indiana where its been proven that im either related by blood or marriage to about 65 percent of the town………
but the thing that made me never want to move back happened when I was 14 or 15 and went back for a visit
Grandpa who I was staying with had been a sub minister at or helped start 3 or 4 Pentecostal churches in the town was well known at the gm plant so and was the head of the family…
well me and a cousin went to see an old friend who was about 10-15 minutes away we watched a movie hung out and left about 11:00 walking down the main street stopped at the convenience store got snacks and pop and was home by 11:35
my grandpa had gotten at least 5 or 6 calls letting him know we were tramping all over creation …and my dad even got a few asking if he knew we were in town and tramping around ….
if the house we went to wasn’t a family friend wed of been bitched at for days …… that’s when I decided I like my wide open desert spaces ……
This is a story about my parents, not me, but it happened near the moderate sized town of Walla Walla, Washington( pop 33k)
While their health and age permitted my folks took motorcycle trips each summer, with Mom riding behind Dad. One year, in the aforementioned location, they had an accident. Coming around a curve in the road there was gravel spilled, and between that and leaning into the curve the cycle slid out from underneath them. Dad had a bad gash on his arm, Mom broke her ankle. They were taken to the hospital in Walla Walla. While there a volunteer put Dad in touch with a retired gentleman who had been a motorcycle racer and crop duster, and bombadier in WWII. Dude was shot down and in a German POW camp, escaping three times but always getting caught. He helped Dad work on his vehicle, and put him up at his house for two days, while Mom waited in the hospital. This guy also guided him to a small truck for sale that Dad bought, as Mom wouldn’t be up to riding back on the cycle. My folks became friends with this guy and his wife and kept in touch with them until they passed away. For several years Mom sent a big container of popcorn, in a fancy tin, to the hospital volunteers, and would get a nice thank you note, which usually included a story on how everyone competed to get the fancy tin when it was empty.
Walla Walla sounded like a nice place to be.
Different strokes …but I would guess you’d have felt differently if you were the parent or grandparent and it was your kid out late without letting you know where he was.
My best one was from a few years ago, it wouldn’t be legal now due to bank regulations changing.
I’d been overseas for a year, and was back temporarily living with my parents for a bit. One day my parents asked if, seeing as I was off for the day, would I mind taking some of their business’ cash takings in to the bank, which was in the local big village where we’d lived previously- population around 2000. They gave me the account details, but, just as an experiment, I got to the teller and simply said ‘Hi, could I put this in my parents’ account please?’ and got the reply ‘Their private one or the business account?’ 
Yup, she not only knew who my parents were, despite the fact I moved out the village 10 years earlier and I wouldn’t have been in that branch at all for at least 2 or 3 years, she knew both account codes without checking.
Seems like every other small town in Indiana has a Chinese restaurant. Midwesterners do love a buffet!
that and Indiana was the “best place in the us to open a new restaurant” by the major trade magazines (yes they have trade magazines for Asian restaurants) and the small town I mentioned above was the no1 city in Indiana for new restaurants from about 98 to 2006 or so when the recession was just starting
they went from having one that was almost out of business to 12 in about 8 years and half are still there
My family comes from a modest city. And visiting there is a lesson in weird connections. Was introduced to a cousin’s old coach, who turned out to be an uncle’s brother-in-law. Visited another uncle and he had a friend with him. Who was the brother of my mother’s first roommate after she left home (70+ years ago).
And in each case the family relations were from different sides.
Just a ton of stuff like that. For a small town it’s got to be 5x more interconnected.
My aunt was born in a small Kansas town (population ~4000) and lived there for 50 years, at which time she was widowed and subsequently married a man from a nearby town. When she passed away recently, her children decided to hold the funeral and bury her in her home town. There are actually two funeral homes and two florists in the town!
When I called a florist, the woman who answered the phone sounded like she was about 100 years old. But she was very competent and helpful and seemed to already know everything about the funeral. She assured me that she’d get the floral arrangement to the right place at the right time and that she’d make an arrangement that looked good with the other arrangements.
When I gave her payment information, she said, “You must be Titus’ daughter. I knew you aunt. She was a beautiful person”. I agreed, and we cried together on the phone for a few minutes.
I see that the town now has a Mexican restaurant.
On my aunt’s 70th birthday, her grandchildren took her to Red Lobster in Bigger City. She had never had seafood before.
Grew up on a farm in the Riverina of NSW and the nearest town was about 40 miles away.
At one stage the local police had two high speed chases after cars stolen from the main street in one week. To highlight the issue they did a spot survey.
They walked the main street on Saturday morning and checked how secure each the parked vehicles were. They found nearly 200 cars unlocked (over 75% of vehicles), nearly 50 had the keys in the ignition and 5 had the motors running.