I recently came back from vacationing in my home town of Toppenish, WA. Time after time when talking about it they refer to it as a small town even though it has 8,000 people. I kept correcting them “it’s not a small town”. Many of the towns in the area are much smaller than it. You have to have fewer than 3000 people to be a small town in my book. What do you consider a “small town”, and is that affected by where you grow up?
I grew up in Madison, WI – population ~220k these days.
Lots of small towns in WI though - I visited a lot back when I was in High School and would travel for extracurriculars.
Anything less than maybe 10-15k in my book is a “small town”. For the record, I consider Madison to be a “small city”.
The definition blurs of course when you’re in a metro area. I’m currently living in the northwest suburbs of Chicago. Lots of towns around here are less than 20k but I don’t consider hardly any of them “small towns” because they’re all part of the great northwestern sprawl of Chicago 
This topic made me curious, so I went to Wikipedia and looked up a few places I’d been to that struck me as small towns.
The SMALLEST population was 8,000 (Glastonbury, which by the way struck me as more of a village than a town!). Most of the places I looked up were over 10,000, at the very least.
I’m biased though. I lived for half my life near Seoul, which has 10 million people. My parents lived in Anyang (population 600,000) and my friends always teased me about being a “country girl.”
I consider somewhere like Bath to be a mid-sized town (population 80,000). (Yes, I know it’s technically a city, but I think of it as a town.) I suppose small town would be below 50k then. YMM definitely V.
A small town in Australia will have at least one pub, which might also incorporate the general store and the Post Office/bank. Population might be as few as twenty permanent residents, but the ‘town’ will also service outlying areas as well.
Smaller than that and it’s a locality: the road in might sport a sign telling you you’re now in, say, Bringabongalong, but one blink and you’re on the road out again.
Bigger than that and it’s a dinkum town. Three pubs and it’s a metropolis!
Gee, my nearest population center has lost its metropolis status then, having just this week lost one of its 3 bars due to a lack of roving snowmobile gangs in recent years. It still has a gas station and a feed store and 198 citizens.
I consider anything under about 5,000 residents a small town. I grew up in Minneapolis, which is a fairly large city complex when one factors in St. Paul and the suburbs. I’ve been to Chicago :eek: and that’s about the biggest city I ever hope to see.
Anything with only one zip code, in my book.
That’s pretty much what I was going to say. If you live in a place that only has one (church/strip club/drive thru daiquiri joint/etc.) then you’re in a small town.
There are some small towns scattered on the road from Vegas to Phoenix, but I bet I would be surprised if I knew their population. One of them, Kingman, I’ve just learned has an international airport!
Wikeiup probably has fewer than 5,000 people, though. My parents broke down there before, and the locals helped them find the only hotel in town - a building the size of a house, with 5 rooms for rent. I’m not sure if they were teasing, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was true.
Under 1.2 million. 
Even though where I live is technically a “city” at 32,000 people, to me it’s a small town because it’s so provincial. It’s not anywhere people want to live. It’s where you live until you get out, or where you get trapped because you can’t get a good enough job/you had kids when you were 16 and now you’re too poor to move/etc. It’s not really pretty and there’s not much to do, so it’s a small town.
Anything with a population less than 5700 personnel. Which, coincidentally, is about one third again the population of my home town when I was growing up.
The town I live in is a small town, very small actually. According to the Wikipedia entry for Paia, Hawaii:
Now however, I think I remember hearing that Paia now had around 3,000 people, but it never seems that much at all, considering the main ‘town’ area is quite small and is mostly hippies and tourists…as usual. 
I went to elementary/junior-high school here, and lived here for most of my life. Overall I like living in a small town like this, the thought of living in a large city is kind of overwhelming to me. I like visiting a large city, and I did fall in love with Vancouver when I went to Canada a couple years ago to the point of thinking of moving there, but it’s still kind of intimidating.
EDIT: I went looking for more information, and according to this site:
So yeah, we’re not even at 3,000 yet.
I grew up in a village with a population of around 100.
Anything with a population of less than about 10 000 is a small town in my book. Below 1 500 or so, it’s a large village.
I was going to say anything that had to share a zip code with a larger neighboring community.
I grew up in a town of about 2800-3000 people. To me, that’s a medium-sized town. My parents now live in a town, population 327 last census. That is a small town to me.
My husband, who grew up in the Baltimore metro area, thinks of Yellowknife NWT as a small town but qualifies it as a city due to its position as the capital of NWT. Current population is 18,700 according to wikipedia.
I live in Madison now, which feels very small-town to me.
So I would say anything 200,00 or smaller.
What can I say, I’m a city boy.
I’d lean toward any town with fewer than 10,000 to 15,000 people as a “small town”. Anything larger than that starts to get into “small city” status in my head. The town I grew up in had 6,000 but the outskirts had enough housing developments to raise that to roughly 12,000-14,000.
Still, though, it surprises people at how I turned out because they think of a tiny little town like the one I grew up in and expect me to know about farming and livestock and all that. I don’t know anything about that stuff, I grew up right next to the town center in a more “suburban” style existence. Neighbors on either side, cable TV, small back yard, all that.
I grew up in a town with about 275 people, so my sense of small town is one where absolutely everyone knows each other–they might not be friends, but they do, at least, know ‘Oh, that’s the Richards house on the corner there, they have 2 kids’ kind of things about each other. Thus, towns with 10,000 people are just towns, or small cities.
So where’s the breaking point? I dunno. Maybe 1000? I would think anything more than that and everyone won’t know everyone anymore.
Even at 5 p.m. on the Beltline during the week?
5,000 is my metric, based on nothing all that scientific.