The Glories of Small Towns

As we commemorate our nation’s 250th anniversary this year, it is worth remembering (and also celebrating) the fact that America’s victory in the Revolution, brought about in great part by soldiers who excelled at hunting for game in wooded terrain, was the product of small-town, rural thinking and patriotism.

American towns in the eighteenth century were indeed relatively small—even the big cities. The second chapter of David McCollough’s celebrated biography of John Adams begins with this observation:

Philadelphia, the provincial capital of Pennsylvania on the western bank of the Delaware River, was a true eighteenth-century metropolis, the largest, wealthiest city in British America, and the most beautiful. Visitors wrote in praise of its ‘very exactly straight streets,’ its ‘many fair houses and public edifices,’ and of the broad, tidal Delaware, alive in every season but winter with a continuous traffic of ships great and small…By 1776 its population was approaching 30,000.

A few short years later, the 1790 census reports the U.S. population at just under 4 million mostly rural souls, with New York’s population at just over 33,100 and Philadelphia coming in at 28,500. Boston, Charleston, and Baltimore were each well under 20,000.

It was not thus eastward across the pond; London really was a metropolis, with a population of about 800,000. England was urban and already industrializing at that point.

Of course, large cities like London are generally unmanageable and rely on boroughs, of which London has 32, subdivided into over 100 districts. New York City has five boroughs, but its residents often take pride in the many smaller neighborhoods. Manhattan has more than 50 of these, with an average population of around 30,000. Where I live in Missouri, in St. Louis County west of the City of St. Louis, there are 88 separate municipalities with an average population of less than 11,500.

The fragmentation of large cities into smaller districts, boroughs, neighborhoods or what-have-you makes sense, and not just from a management capacity perspective. People instinctively want to be from smaller towns. Hallmark channels this idea perfectly in its television movies, but there is a more articulate literary voice: G.K. Chesterton’s 1904 novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill.

This book is set eighty years in the future and portrays the various parts of London at war with each other when a madman becomes king of England and encourages local leaders, as a lark, to wear uniforms specific to their communities. Adam Wayne, the provost of Notting Hill, is the only one who takes him seriously, and chaos ensues as he seeks to defend his community: “‘Notting Hill,’ said the provost, simply, ‘is a rise or high ground of the common earth, on which men have built houses to live, in which they are born, fall in love, pray, marry, and die. Why should I think it absurd?’”

This speech is reminiscent of George Bailey’s response in It’s a Wonderful Life, when Potter wants to close his recently deceased father’s building-and-loan:

“Just remember this, Mr. Potter, that this rabble you’re talking about, they do most of the working and paying and living and dying in this community. Well, is it too much to have them work and pay and live and die in a couple of decent rooms and a bath? Anyway, my father didn’t think so. People were human beings to him, but to you, a warped, frustrated old man, they’re cattle. Well, in my book he died a much richer man than you’ll ever be.”

Like Notting Hill, Bedford Falls was worth saving—which means it was worth fighting for.

Small towns not only engender local and national patriotism, but they also create the conditions for the arts to flourish. Recently on the social media channel X—formerly Twitter, as we must always say—someone pointed out that Renaissance Florence produced more art in 70 years with a population of 70,000 than the whole world in the last 70 years. The writer noted the same thing about music, with the influence of Salzburg and Vienna, concluding that “the law of diminishing returns in city size and population is an iron law.”

One commenter on the original post noted, as another example, the small city of Chartres and its famous cathedral. The population of Chartres in 1200 was less than 10,000, and I am reminded of the many beautiful churches built over the centuries in smaller towns. Driving across the United States on Interstate 70, for example, one can gaze south at a certain point and see the “Cathedral of the Plains,” the Basilica of St. Fidelis in Victoria, Kansas (pop. 1,100). Out in the middle of flat farmland, this historic church has a capacity similar to that of Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago and could hold its town’s entire population.

There is, of course, one especially significant precedent for small-town superiority. The greatest person who ever lived, and who inarguably had the most influence on the global stage across millennia, came from a small town with a population counted only in the hundreds. This town was historically mocked; its critics often wondered, in fact, whether anything good could ever come from Nazareth.

Image Credit: Peter Bruegel the Elder, “The Hunters in the Snow” (1565)