So I like to spend much time surfing on Google Maps and exploring various parts of the world. And so I see towns and cities in states like Montana, Wyoming, N. -S . Dakota etc. that have few hundred or few thousand citizens. So what is it like to live there, what kind of jobs do they have? It can’t be all farming since famrland seems scarce in these kinds of places. And it also does not seem poor; houses are in good condition, fresh lawns, streets and yards are clean etc. For example Chadron, Nebraska, Pierre, S. Dakota, Cody, Wyoming …
Also for example West Virginia seems to be full of tiny towns scattered around remote hilly landscape (ex. Weston, WV.
Are places like this “alive” and have good salaries and living conditions, or do (young) people tend to emmigrate to larger cities? Anybody here living in such a town can share some experience?
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I used to spend summers up in the Black Hills. Fifteen minute drive to the nearest store, thirty to a proper town, forty-five to a town where you could buy things beyond groceries and hardware store supplies.
Mostly we just stayed put, did our work, cooked our own meals, and read books or played games of an evening. Hiked some, on days off. A quiet life.
Once a week we’d go into town, pick up mail, check out some books and check email at the library, call friends on the phone, buy groceries, drop off recycling, and maybe get take-out.
I live in a town of 1,000 people in Central New Hampshire. Dirt road, 80 acres, can’t see any other houses…you get the gist. Not much farmland up here….too many rocks. The houses range from literally tents (we have no zoning, so you can legally live in a tent) to million dollar renovated old farm houses. About a 1/3 of the properties are second homes or vacation rentals.
Since the pandemic there has been an influx of professional types who work from home. I work from home in the environmental field. Basically I write reports and occasionally travel (a lot more in my early career). My wife works in Academia and commutes about 45 min each way.
I would say this town is more alive than larger towns that I have lived in other states. There is almost a “back to the land” vibe here minus the hippy communes.
I’ll give you my experience as former resident of rural KY and going there for vacations.
It takes about 35-40 minutes to get to “town” to go grocery shopping and Walmart. It’s quiet as hell. Commutes to work are insane, my uncle worked in the coal mines and would drive 2.5-3 hours one way to get there.
A lot of jobs are factory work (with a long ass commute), coal mines, retail/fast food, nursing and teaching. That’s really about it.
It’s interesting living over an hour from Walmart or any other box store, it’s nice being friends with the local hardware store people. Don’t hurt yourself too bad because the good hospital is also over an hour away. You can pretty much do whatever you want and nobody is around to give a fuck.
A few thousand is “sparsely populated”?
Like sure, that’s not a major metropolis, but that’s like every American small town
Meth, opioids and alcohol
Cody is a big town to me! Lol.
But it is quiet and I have a chunk of earth that’s all mine. We have land and raise goats.
I lived on unincorporated land (aka no city claimed it) outside of Cumby, Texas, population 200 at the time (late 90’s).
30 minutes to the nearest city with a Wal*mart and fast food. My mom commuted to Dallas to work in a law firm, it was a 2 hour commute each way with traffic in Dallas.
I was in college in PA at the time and the internet was new. My sister had horses on the land. When i was home for summer breaks, our time was spent driving to visit friends in Dallas, or just hanging around the house, dealing with the animals and watching TV, reading.
Have you ever heard of Nowhere, Arizona?
There are no jobs, lots of drugs, and a lot of depression. That’s about it.
Living in a small town in North Dakota, most recent census data I saw said 110 people in the town.
It’s quiet. There’s a ton of farming, we’re in the red river valley, which is some of the most fertile soil in the world. If a business isn’t directly agriculture, it’s agriculture related (machine service, chemical, equipment, etc.). There’s also a ton of manufacturing. I currently leaving GE building wind blades, and moving to another manufacturing job building airplanes. Do the most part there isn’t a whole lot of opportunity though if you don’t want to go into agriculture, manufacturing or the healthcare (a lot of elderly people, and most little towns will have their own hospital) industry. Most people I went to school with have moved away to bigger cities for much much higher pay. It should also be said cost of living here is very cheap. You can buy a nice 4 bedroom house for like $40,000 because there’s not a lot of demand for them.
In that town there’s a lot of issues with alcohol abuse and meth and opioids. But the druggies kinda keep to themselves for the most part and don’t bother anyone. It’s overall a very safe place to live. It gets lonely from time to time. You know everyone from the next couple towns around on a first name basis and your families likely go back generations. They’re some of the best communities I’ve ever seen. This past spring our town flooded with the snowmelt and when the alarms went off at 1am everyone came from many towns over to help sandbag and pump water.
I stay at my brothers 10 acre property in small town PA sometimes. Still waiting to see a black bear. Other than a wave from a distant car driving by on the road you never see any neighbors. Definitely a change of pace from the suburbs of NYC.
Where you have to remember to leave enough gas in the car … to get to the gas station to put more gas in the car …
Town of 3600 in rural Ohio.
Cody WY is definitely not a small town.
At least, not that small like you’re referring to.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cody,_Wyoming
In regards to your last point, Maine is a very old and rural state. All the young people move away to more crowded parts of the state down south or out of state.
My best friend lives in Cut Bank, Montana, population ~3000 people. Her husband works in town, she works in a different town. There is stuff to do, but you have to go further and be a bit more creative. High school sports are an occasion even if you don’t have kids, you plan your meals out in advance because if you want Chinese or Indian food it takes at least an hour to get to it, and going to the movies or Target/Walmart is a day trip into Kalispell and you don’t really go between November and March because of the weather. Some towns are nicer than others, but it’s not a bad place to live, if a bit boring at times.
I grew up in two of them. I graduated high school from a class of 26 in a town of 500 in montana. If we hadn’t moved from Colorado, It would have been a graduating class of 9.
The town in Montana was close enough to a bigger city that lots of people worked in the city. Locally, there were a few stores and some ranches. In Colorado, it was completely rural, most everyone was tied to a ranch or logging operation or something like that.
In both cases, my family were the out of towners or the new blood because my parents weren’t born there. My parents also weren’t initially welcome, because the worked for the federal government (Forest Service and Fish and Wildlife Service), but people warmed up eventually.
As for actually living there, can’t complain. It was boring at times, the internet was terrible, I think we were years behind the rest of the state getting cell service… but I could explore trails on my mountain bike, very much grew up without constant monitoring and my parents just had me be home before dark. I was in scouts and 4H. I hunted and fished, I raised pigs as a project, we camped often, went skiing in the winter (which raised the ire of classmates, as they were snowmobilers).
I definitely miss that style life now that by necessity I’m in the city.
Personally, I think Wyoming is the best place in the world for a young single guy to get his start. Find a cheap community college and a summer job on an oil rig or coal mine. Rent is low, wages are high. I was able to support a wife and son working 3 months out of the year while working on my degree. There’s tons of hiking and camping. You can disappear into the woods for weeks at a time. We have constitutional carry, so you don’t need a license to pack heat. There’s tons of places you practice longrange shooting (1000+ meters). You can go to Yellowstone and watch hippies get killed by Buffalo. 10/10
its nice until a deer stands on its hind legs and says your name in your mother’s voice
I live in Indiana, town of less than 900. Lots of Amish, nothing to do unless you really like Dollar General because there isn’t much else.
You pretty well have to drive elsewhere for work but not necessarily very far at all. The nearest towns (2 nearby) are like 10 minutes away and are like 10k and 16k population. I drive about 15 minutes to work most of the time, but my job also requires occasionally traveling to different locations across a few states, but usually within 2 hours.
Most people have at least 3-5 acres, some have a hell of lot more. It’s pretty nice to have a little bit of property and not lock your doors. I can take a piss in the middle of my front lawn in the middle of the day and no one is around to see unless a car is driving by, but you can here them coming with enough notice. I often take the dogs out back in my underwear because there are literally no neighbors within view of the back yard. It’s quiet, but not too far away from everything.
Venomous snakes & mountain lions are the main things out here that are a threat. I don’t hunt but I’ve got a could guns that are primarily for protection from the wildlife.
A lot of people are willing to make a long commute to work. In big metropolitan areas, it’s not uncommon to drive an hour or two in heavy traffic to get to work. I work across the city from my home, and I drive at least an hour one-way. In that respect, driving an hour or two through the countryside to work isn’t that different.
Like most things, I think the big difference is wealth.
Living in the country because you’ve got money for a big chunk of land and nice house and can afford the gas to commute is one thing. You can schedule your time around trips to town to work, shop, see doctors, etc.
Living in the country because you don’t have the resources to leave is quite another.
I was stationed in North Dakota. Lived north of the base in a little town called Glenburn. Had one stoplight no stores.
The actual house I lived in was down a dirt road. The gas station was only open couple of hours a day.
Very friendly people. I rarely if ever locked my door. Especially in the winter time, so if I got a package from my folks in Florida, the mailman would open up my front door and put it inside.
My parents had a habit of putting the temperature in Florida near the return address. The mailman LOVED this. He got such a kick out of it. And so the neighbors heard about it to. They all thought it was a hoot.
It was very isolated and there was nothing much to do. But I was taking classes online at the time, and I’m a huge reader so I didn’t have too much problems.
I hate, hate, hate the snow. So as soon as my time was done there, I hightailed it out of there heading to Florida.
I live in the city, but I’ve experienced small town life. It’s pretty quiet for the most part. Not much crime, traffic is decent, and in very small towns, everyone knows everyone.
I’ve been to all the western towns OP mentions many times and have family living in rural WY, AK, ID, OR, and other similar places. These places are all fairly big towns actually– Chadron has a college —and there are jobs there like any other place: retail, medical, service, government, etc. Cody is a huge tourist town with lots of traffic in season. Pierre has 14K people and is a retail center– it’s over 2x the size of the town I live in. My most remote-living family are 200+ miles from any place with a store you’d recognize by name or a town with more than a combination grocery/gas/retail store, though they do now have a Subway about 30 miles away.
Plenty to do in all these places. Many residents are into outdoor stuff: hunting, fishing, camping, winter sports, etc. But otherwise folks are probably doing the same things they would in a town of 50K, just with fewer grocery stores and restaurants to pick from. A town with 5K people will usually have everything you need (and often two or more of each) unless you are someone who wants “night life” and like to pay for entertainment.
It runs the gamut.
First of all, it’s possible to farm just about anywhere. There may be farming that you don’t realize. Agriculture includes animal husbandry so places like e.g. Montana are actually big farm states.
Some small towns in scenic areas are mostly vacation homes. If you see a very fancy, unusually large house in the middle of nowhere, it’s more like than not to be somebody’s summer house.
Some small towns in e.g. West Virginia used to be bigger, but failed for economic reasons, like the local mine closing. And people inherit their grandparents old house and move out of cities to live there for free.
Lots of working class homeowners still take care of their property. It doesn’t cost that much to get a lawn mower at Home Depot. It’s when you have a lot of homes for rent where stuff goes downhill. Homes in a lot of these small towns are inexpensive and it is cheaper to buy than rent an apartment.
You might like geo guesser – https://www.geoguessr.com/maps/world/play
I was born in a farming town of about 6000 people in eastern WA. My family then moved outside a tiny community of 100 in SE Idaho. We then moved to a rural city of 13000 in NE New Mexico, where I lived until I graduated high school, and which I consider my hometown.
When I lived in SE Idaho, we lived five miles out of town, and our nearest neighbor was half a mile away. We were about as isolated as you can get without going off the grid. Grocery shopping and buying fuel for cars had to be carefully planned around our Sunday trips to go to church 25 miles away. Eating out a restaurant, or activities like bowling and seeing a movie, were rare treats. When us kids weren’t playing outside, we read a lot, played a lot of board games, and watched movies on VHS. The weather played a huge role in daily life, especially considering how cold it got in the winter.
The town was based around potato farming, with a little bit of cattle ranching mixed in. Every fall, the schools would shut down for an annual harvest break to allow kids to help with the potato harvest. Everyone wore multiple hats. Farmers owned side businesses as mechanics, farriers, veterinarians, contractors, etc. Housewives (a full time supervisory position in the Mormon Corridor) helped run the community preschool. The lunch lady at my elementary school also drove a school bus. Civic life was huge, and most people volunteered with either the school parent-teacher organization, the local LDS ward, the town’s Lions Club chapter, and/or the volunteer fire department. Most everyone had a job, and a lot of my old classmates stayed in the area when they grew up.
Grew up in very small town. When you went “into town”, it was to the hardware or feed store, the pharmacy, the diner, courthouse, church and pretty much all on one street. Every place you shopped at could be “put on your account”. You paid your account once a month or the pharmacy let you pay in installments. There was one dr and he damn near delivered every baby in that town. There was a real service station. Someone pumped my gas. Everyone’s address was Route 9. The post office knew which PO Box to put it in. We didn’t have 911 or paid fire department. The pastor of our church was also a volunteer firefighter. It was so dark, tons of stars every single night. We never locked our doors. My parents commuted 1.5hrs to work in Dallas. We did lots outside. Hiking, hunting, fishing, mudding, swimming, water skiing, playing with our animals, hanging out with each other playing cards or throwing bones – always includes the best damn food ever. Parties in high school were out in fields with bonfires and all kinds of nonsense. If the cops showed up, they would never get mad. Just tell us to haul ass or they’d tell our parents. If you got in trouble at school, you got licks, and then before you even got home, your momma knew you did something bad and got licks. Then you’d get in trouble again when your dad got home. Lol. Everyone knew everyone else’s business. Any kind of emergency, and you could truly count on your neighbors. I’ve lived in the heart of downtown Dallas as a young adult and out in the country. I much prefer the country.
I only came back to the incredibly rural place I was from because I could afford to have modern advancements placed on my property. Some people still chose to stay, but I don’t think there is anyone who makes above the standard living wage save for myself and the farmers.
Where I live is fairly isolated, as far as the midwestern/Great Lakes states go.
The jobs are mainly healthcare related, education, retail, farming, logging, and trades. Most of northern Michigan has been losing population for decades because of the lack of opportunity for young people. Educated young people go away to college and don’t come back, there’s not much industry here for them.
The increase in work-from-home has changed things a little, we have had some new people move in because they don’t have to go to an office.
Overall, northern Michigan is struggling mightily economically. A few population centers like Traverse City (health care, tourism) and Marquette (university, regional hub, health care) are doing ok…the rest is fighting for survival.
I never have but it’s my life goal
I lived in a small town in rural Idaho for a while. It was incredibly quiet, most people were either potato farmers, ranchers, or fly fishing guides. We got a lot of tourism because we were on the way to Yellowstone Natl Park. Many people worked in tourism as well.
There is one grocery store in town and a couple mom n pop restaurants. I noticed I saved a lot more money living up there and that I cooked a lot more for myself. Gas was more expensive, so were groceries. I would go to the Costco (an hour away) every few weeks to restock on stuff.
All in all, living in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem was so rad. So much amazing exploration right at your fingertips, I really loved it. Life was peaceful and slow. I miss it.
People tend to forget that United States is very large and most of what is developed are the larger cities of the more popular states. Drive any back roads to your destination in the south and mostly you see rural areas. This holds true for the Midwest and some New England states as well. States like Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and Alaska are totally outliers.
> (ex. Weston, WV.
I actually stayed one night at a hotel there on my way to Kentucky lol.
I live within “errand distance” of Cody — less than an hour in good weather, or if the tourist traffic isn’t too heavy 😛 The job market isn’t bad in this area, but in Cody at least, if you don’t already own a house, you probably never will. I think most of the people who hold working-class jobs there commute from the poorer towns to the north and east. There’s a definite brain drain of younger residents, which would probably be even worse without the college in Powell. (That said, a lot of the A and B students go to school in Laramie, Bozeman, or Provo, and often they don’t come back.)
There actually is a significant amount of farming here, mostly irrigated land along the Shoshone and Bighorn rivers. I think barley and sugar beets are the main crops; not a lot of people farm full-time, but there’s a noticeable influx of seasonal workers, particularly in the fall.
Funny you should mention Cody. I worked/lived in the Lake Area of Yellowstone NP, and Cody was the closest town.
Park worker life is unique. You’re in the middle of wilderness, but surrounded by hundreds of people in weird little enclaves. One night something went wrong with the telcom system, and phones & internet went down. Our only link to the outside world was the radio at the main ranger station. For someone who’d always lived in or near cities, thet felt weird. Most people knew nothing about it. I only knew because my job happened to cross paths with the Security dept & law enforcement rangers.
Pretty much every sort of animal in the park wandered through the dorm area at one point of another. You had to be alert, especially at night. My third summer there, an employee was killed by a bear on his day off. It wasn’t in the dorm area & most of us hadn’t known him, but it still sent shock waves through our little society.
Anyway, we went into Cody pretty often on our weekends. There’s a Wal-Mart a lot of visited for for snacks & toiletries. It wasn’t unusual to see families with 2 or 3 carts packed to the rim with supplies. No doubt they lived in the more remote ranches.
Cody also has a family planning/STD clinic. I was past needing such services & had a partner back home, but a lot of employees were regulars. The clinic liked to sent them back with armloads of condoms – an STD clinic is one of the rare places that wants to have fewer customers. The condoms usually got left in a common area for whoever wanted them. Usually they disappeared within a few hours.
Most of Cody’s economy is based on tourism. There are tons of motels, bars & restaurants, and several tourist attractions. The Buffalo Bill museum is great, and hosts a pow-wow every summer. One year I joined a wild mustang tour in the BLM land outside the town.
Besides being a gateway town for Yellowstone, it’s also the county seat of Park County. So it has gov’t offices & a courthouse. Presumably there’s also a jail.
Because it’s not just a tourist town, Cody is also a good place for services. I got my hair cuts & oil changes there. One year, I had my windshield replaced, after a rock gave it a spider crack.
If you ever visit Yellowstone, Cody is a good place to stay. It’s a 2 hour drive, but has spectacular views most of the way. I’m convinced the Shoshone Nat’l Forest would be a major attraction in its own right, if it wasn’t eclipsed by the park.