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In attractive small towns to which many out-of-staters might move, aren't there a lot of people looking to make new friends, or at least friendly acquaintances?
It seems to me that if a newcomer was really interested, they might be able to start a "newcomers club" -- just a coffee and cake (or wine and cheese) social in their home.
I believe most people find in any town a reflection of themselves similar to what one sees in many of these forums. If a person really despises small towns, you'll find them hanging around in the Rural and Small Town Living forums pointing out the bad things about small small towns. If you want to see who really has a deep seated hatred of religion, go to the Religion forums. The same applies to the various car model threads in the Automotive forums. If there is any difference in the level of happiness between people who live in cities versus those who don't, commenting in a forum that has little or no applicability to you proves little but your own unhappiness.
Most people simply move to where they want to live. Some, like me, do it because they have experience in both city and rural living and prefer one over the other. Some move simply because it's the life they have always known and love.
Nearly every time I pass this forum, the lead thread is about something bad about small towns or rural living. If you are one of those people who needs their unhappy image validated, keep in mind that many of us who have decided to bring our families to rural America are very happy to tell you every bad thing you have said about our chosen home is true. We do this in case you decide that being our neighbor is the illusive utopia you seek.
Yes, there are many people in small towns who are very friendly to outsiders but I suspect this is not common. I suspect that many people in small towns are isolated from the ways of the big city and feel threatened by people who are different than they are. Just a hunch and it is impossible to come up with what the true situation is in every town. But with boards such as this maybe others can tell their personal experiences.
Why do you suspect that it is not common for people in small towns to be friendly?
What ways of the big city are you referring to?
Is anyone isolated these days unless by sheer intent? A million channels and the internet connect us to the ways of anywhere we are interested in knowing about.
As far a people being different, well for example my address is the closest incorporated town, population 2500 but I live in a town in the next county of, well the census doesn't have a population for it, and the county seat 15 miles away has a population of less than 11,000. My point is you would be surprised at the diversity, not just racial but cultural and class as well. There are people from all over. It is not the differences between locals and those who moved to the area that create a threat but those that have a habit of trying to change things to be like the place they fled. No one embraces that.
Quote:
Originally Posted by politically_correct
Relatives of mine where so happy to be able to retire when they both reached 65. They were also happy to be able to move out of the big City and into the small town in Southern MN they grew up in years ago. Trouble was, the friendly small town they remembered from their youth had changed. Instead of friendly they found a closed society of small minded poorly educated people who did not like outsiders. I suspect this is the case in many small towns all over America.
How had it changed? What particular experiences occurred that led your relatives to feel like outsiders How were the people small minded and what indicated that they were all poorly educated?
There are some insular acting small towns that I wouldn't want to live in and there are others that are great. They might be 10 miles apart. The trick I think is finding ones with bookstores.
A good bookstore and a coffee shop with good pie says a lot about a small town to my way of thinking.
There are some insular acting small towns that I wouldn't want to live in and there are others that are great. They might be 10 miles apart. The trick I think is finding ones with bookstores.
A good bookstore and a coffee shop with good pie says a lot about a small town to my way of thinking.
I think people expect too much. I plan on moving when I retire to a small town in the middle of the country but I don't expect people to roll out the red carpet for me. I'll be happy if I get the occasional hand wave and smile. With time, I think people will get to know me and I'll make a few friends, but I'm the kind of person that isn't looking for close friendships unless they happen naturally with time and with genuine people. If it doesn't happen, then that's fine too. I'm not moving there for the purpose of making new close friends as long as people aren't outright hostile.
I have spent a lot of time wandering the world and the USA, my home country. Some of the places I have lived include small mountain towns in CA, farming communities in AZ and a spot in the North Carolina Outer Banks area. These are aside from various cities and small towns above the rural level of that moniker.
One town in which I was a local and known for years (in the Sierra Nevada range, So. Cal.) somewhat illustrates what my overall thoughts are on the nature of small communities. I was raised on a ranch near this town, and my family had one of the more well-known concerns, with eggs and some horse breeding on two plots. When I reached the middle of high school, I moved to a mid-sized city except during school breaks, when I would be at the ranch working and occasionally able to see a friend who came by or who had not gone on a vacation and showed up for church. I joined the military, and even that amount of interaction stopped. In general, it was an agricultural area with a facility for juvenile detention and some recreation. The people in the area knew each other for miles around, and the towns spread around us were all kind of a super-village when it came to knowing one another.
I joined the military, finished my term, graduated college and started a career, got married, then widowed, and eventually was given the chance to pursue my work online, which I took. I moved out to the old small town mostly for the air and the privacy of the place I rented, the quiet, and to grieve. I visited with relatives, of course, but going down the hill was their choice, as they were not much for hanging around town. I went to the store, went to a bar once in a while and fished when I was not too busy. I stayed to myself, but was friendly and waved when travelling the road, mostly to a wave back. People were standoffish at best, and dirty looks in a bar were not unusual when the bar maid would chat me up too much.
One day, at a long-time locals' favorite fishing hole, some of the locals noticed me off by myself, and one came over and told me to go somewhere else. I refused, told him I had been fishing there all my life, though I had not been in a decade, and was not in the military any more nor a salesman, so I wasn't open to take his orders. I gave him a look that let him know I was annoyed and wanted to be left alone.
He walked back to their little group after mumbling something about having it my way, etc. etc. An older man came over a few minutes later and asked how the fish were biting, made some small talk, then finally said, "This is a locals' spot, really. Not to put too fine a point..." and said he came over to politely ask me to leave to avoid trouble, seeing as I was "a newcomer." I recognized him.
I nodded, reeled a little and then looked over at him and asked, "I understand you don't recognize me, but I guess you don't deliver my grandpa's feed anymore at your age, huh Lester?" His mouth fell open and he gave me that kind of 'closer look' face before I looked away and moved my line a little in the water.
"I don't deliver feed anymore, I work the counter now," he said. "Hey um, are you one of the ####### boys from up the truck route?" I told him I was and my father's name, and before I could say anything more, he apologized and started bombarding me with questions about where I had gone, did I still ride motorcycles, wasn't I in the service like my uncle told people, etc. He went back to the spot the others were watching and they came back and joined me. We all fished the spot and landed a few good ones, drank some brew and swapped stories. The next week, everybody I ran into on my errands was greeting me by name.
When I was a kid up there, new people were greeted with some food, invitations to churches and community events, waylaid at the feed store or grocery or trading post for hours, and generally just viewed with curiosity and openness. But while I had been gone, a number of bad things had gone on, including a 'biker' group that had taken over one of the more depressed areas and started dealing and making speed, a bad housing development that dropped the water tables and forced nearly everyone to dig deeper and even then be ready to dig again for new well water, and an invasion by the border patrol and by immigrant smugglers that often turned the quiet, dark hills into a brightly lit, helicopter-patrolled war zone for miles. Added to these were housing booms and rich people in mini-mansions filled with snotty, pushy people who almost always disappeared with an unpaid mortgage and left unaffordably overpriced, derelict, expensive to maintain and ill-suited, impractical properties behind.
The point of this long-winded story is that all small towns and small-town communities have their ups and downs, and even the most open ones eventually shut down to pushy outsiders and big ideas. In America especially, where the most recurrent and relevant trope is a land baron coming to swindle or outright muscle out the hicks and a carpetbagger stopping by to get your vote before he zones you out of existence, the communities we are talking about evolve to survive or die out from a mixture of toxic insularity and poor choices in developing themselves to keep up.
But it's rarely for the reasons we think that communities reject people. Sometimes what is a more reserved, slower development of connections is taken for a firewall of exclusion or a general disregard or mistrust. Sometimes the newcomer is not well-suited to the environment and not aware enough of the local ways to get up to speed on a suitable level. Regardless, unless we are talking about accidentally planting oneself in a 50-100-person village founded by some dumb sect 150 years ago (been there, have the snake-handling, store-porch preacher pictures to prove it), there will always be factions and strains, niches within which one may fit, and a town down the road not too far where there might be a social life with less loss of privacy yet more company of like minds.
In my experience alleged "cliques" are very superficial loose erzatz of the social relationships. Being "included" feels about the same as being a card holding outsider, locals dont really treat you much differently as an outsider, they live like outsiders themselves.
This reminds me of a small town in Kansas with around 3,000 people (perhaps Belleville), where there was a proposal to build a community college there. The proposal was rejected because, in their own words, "They didn't want undesirable demographics moving there."
Personally, I don't know how college kids looking to better their future are undesirable demographics. I went to a community college in a small during my first two years in college. I ended up moving there the second year. The money I spent on housing, food, gas, etc. must have helped out the local businesses, as did the money from other college students. But I guess the people of that small KS town didn't get the memo that those undesirable demographics are actually good for a town.
On another interesting note, that community college would have had healthcare programs for students to go into the medical field to be nurses, doctors, caregivers, pharmacy techs, etc. Later on I read about how those same residents of that town complained about not being able to get healthcare providers to move to their town and many were moving or considering moving to bigger towns and cities in order to get adequate medical attention.
Small towns and counties cant prevent a willing business from moving in, or they will get bancrupt trying. Small towns have trouble attracting businesses, there must have been a long line of the small towns fighting for that community college location (provided federal/state funds paying for it).
I have spent a lot of time wandering the world and the USA, my home country. Some of the places I have lived include small mountain towns in CA, farming communities in AZ and a spot in the North Carolina Outer Banks area. These are aside from various cities and small towns above the rural level of that moniker.
One town in which I was a local and known for years (in the Sierra Nevada range, So. Cal.) somewhat illustrates what my overall thoughts are on the nature of small communities. I was raised on a ranch near this town, and my family had one of the more well-known concerns, with eggs and some horse breeding on two plots. When I reached the middle of high school, I moved to a mid-sized city except during school breaks, when I would be at the ranch working and occasionally able to see a friend who came by or who had not gone on a vacation and showed up for church. I joined the military, and even that amount of interaction stopped. In general, it was an agricultural area with a facility for juvenile detention and some recreation. The people in the area knew each other for miles around, and the towns spread around us were all kind of a super-village when it came to knowing one another.
I joined the military, finished my term, graduated college and started a career, got married, then widowed, and eventually was given the chance to pursue my work online, which I took. I moved out to the old small town mostly for the air and the privacy of the place I rented, the quiet, and to grieve. I visited with relatives, of course, but going down the hill was their choice, as they were not much for hanging around town. I went to the store, went to a bar once in a while and fished when I was not too busy. I stayed to myself, but was friendly and waved when travelling the road, mostly to a wave back. People were standoffish at best, and dirty looks in a bar were not unusual when the bar maid would chat me up too much.
One day, at a long-time locals' favorite fishing hole, some of the locals noticed me off by myself, and one came over and told me to go somewhere else. I refused, told him I had been fishing there all my life, though I had not been in a decade, and was not in the military any more nor a salesman, so I wasn't open to take his orders. I gave him a look that let him know I was annoyed and wanted to be left alone.
He walked back to their little group after mumbling something about having it my way, etc. etc. An older man came over a few minutes later and asked how the fish were biting, made some small talk, then finally said, "This is a locals' spot, really. Not to put too fine a point..." and said he came over to politely ask me to leave to avoid trouble, seeing as I was "a newcomer." I recognized him.
I nodded, reeled a little and then looked over at him and asked, "I understand you don't recognize me, but I guess you don't deliver my grandpa's feed anymore at your age, huh Lester?" His mouth fell open and he gave me that kind of 'closer look' face before I looked away and moved my line a little in the water.
"I don't deliver feed anymore, I work the counter now," he said. "Hey um, are you one of the ####### boys from up the truck route?" I told him I was and my father's name, and before I could say anything more, he apologized and started bombarding me with questions about where I had gone, did I still ride motorcycles, wasn't I in the service like my uncle told people, etc. He went back to the spot the others were watching and they came back and joined me. We all fished the spot and landed a few good ones, drank some brew and swapped stories. The next week, everybody I ran into on my errands was greeting me by name.
When I was a kid up there, new people were greeted with some food, invitations to churches and community events, waylaid at the feed store or grocery or trading post for hours, and generally just viewed with curiosity and openness. But while I had been gone, a number of bad things had gone on, including a 'biker' group that had taken over one of the more depressed areas and started dealing and making speed, a bad housing development that dropped the water tables and forced nearly everyone to dig deeper and even then be ready to dig again for new well water, and an invasion by the border patrol and by immigrant smugglers that often turned the quiet, dark hills into a brightly lit, helicopter-patrolled war zone for miles. Added to these were housing booms and rich people in mini-mansions filled with snotty, pushy people who almost always disappeared with an unpaid mortgage and left unaffordably overpriced, derelict, expensive to maintain and ill-suited, impractical properties behind.
The point of this long-winded story is that all small towns and small-town communities have their ups and downs, and even the most open ones eventually shut down to pushy outsiders and big ideas. In America especially, where the most recurrent and relevant trope is a land baron coming to swindle or outright muscle out the hicks and a carpetbagger stopping by to get your vote before he zones you out of existence, the communities we are talking about evolve to survive or die out from a mixture of toxic insularity and poor choices in developing themselves to keep up.
But it's rarely for the reasons we think that communities reject people. Sometimes what is a more reserved, slower development of connections is taken for a firewall of exclusion or a general disregard or mistrust. Sometimes the newcomer is not well-suited to the environment and not aware enough of the local ways to get up to speed on a suitable level. Regardless, unless we are talking about accidentally planting oneself in a 50-100-person village founded by some dumb sect 150 years ago (been there, have the snake-handling, store-porch preacher pictures to prove it), there will always be factions and strains, niches within which one may fit, and a town down the road not too far where there might be a social life with less loss of privacy yet more company of like minds.
Go there instead if you don't feel right.
Congratulations! Yours is, by far, the longest post I've ever felt compelled to read. That intro sentence, "I have spent a lot of time wandering the world and the USA, my home country", was a very good one and what followed was no less interesting. It was both interesting and enlightening to read what you had to say.
To some extent, I've experienced something similar and learned a meaning to, "sometimes you can't go 'home' again". Communities change and often it's more nostalgic to remember them as we think they were than learn what they now clearly are.
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My experiences have varied
