For those wanting to escape the coronavirus, a small town may not be the place to head. You often have to travel considerably further for a good hospital and it takes only a few cases of coronavirus for the infection rate to be pretty bad.

For example, consider Baca County, Colorado (the southeastern-most county in Colorado) and Harris County, Texas.

With 10 cases, the infection rate in Baca County, population 3,585, is roughly one person for every 358 inhabitants. In contrast, Harris County has 1,151 cases among 4,092,459 inhabitants for a rate of one person per 3,555 inhabitants.

In other words, as far as coronavirus goes, you are far safer in Harris County, Texas than in Baca County, Colorado.

Small town life is still better, though. I got new tires on my car in February. When I went to pay for the tires and pick up my car, I was told to just take the car and they'd bill me later without even asking my mailing address. A couple of weeks later on Friday, they dropped the bill at my office and I went and paid it on the following Monday or Tuesday.

When I take my car to the local Ford dealer for an oil change or other work, they usually drive it back to my office for me and then walk back to the dealership.

I don't even have a key to any doors of my house. There just isn't any need to lock it.

If you would like to compare different cities, this site, http://www.bestplaces.net/compare-cities/, is pretty useful and sometimes kind of funny. For example, if you compare Texhoma, Texas and Texhoma, Oklahoma (literally right across the state line from each other, you can find out that the two towns are almost identical in climate except that Texhoma, Texas has 11 more sunny days a year than Texhoma, Oklahoma.

I know you said Texas, but there are some neat little towns out here in Southern Oregon that'll probably be small for a while. Like east Texas towns, they were built when the timber industry was worth something. Now it's mainly a few people that either can't leave for something bigger/better or they don't want to because they have family there.

Little town of Prospect, OR has no prospects, pun intended. But it's a neat community in an area with great fishing, hunting, and natural beauty. You just have to find a way to make money outside of the community or remotely.

I think many people in McDade thought it would stay small and it still is. McDade also had a school that went from kindergarten to 6th grade when I was growing up. Now it has a high school and a football team. Elgin and Bastrop have grown considerably through the years. I fully expect McDade to have a 2 or 3A high school during my lifetime.

Some of the surrounding ranches near my parents have been sold and broken into 10 acre or so plots. These plots have new homes on them. It's just weird everytime I visit seeing it all.

I would consider Alpine and Ft. Davis small and doubt they grow much in 20 years.

If more than half the city's revenue is generated from speeding tickets.

It's a small town when you give directions based on where people live because you don't know the street names. The only paved street is the main one that gets you in and out of town and has the only street light which is a yellow blinking light. The only cafe in town closes at 3 and you have no choice but to cook at home after that. The only school in town only goes up to 5th grade so you spend the next 7 years getting dropped off at the bus stop at 7 AM for the 40 min bus ride to school. The older folk in town don't call you by your name. They refer to you as your parents child. You don't know people's real names, only by their nicknames, even though you've known them your whole life. Seeing someone riding a horse down main street is normal, and probably a relative. In short, a dot on a map is a small town.

I grew up hearing "you're either growing or you're dying." There's a lot of truth in that and it applies to so many different things. That said, towns and cities tend to grow in respect to the size of their population. Small towns will grow at a much slower rate than a big town, and big towns will grow at a slower rate than a big city.

CenterHillAg said:

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Sasappis said:

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What do you consider a small town? 50k, 30k, 15k or 5k?

What do you consider to "still be a small town"?

The best bet is a county seat.

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2A or smaller, maybe 3A. Growing up Crockett was considered a good sized town, Lufkin and Nacogdoches were the big cities. My hometown is 275, it's all about perspective I suppose.

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Being from nac, i find us being the big city quite hilarious

GSPag` said:

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HBJ said:

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Childress

100-140 miles from Amarillo, Lubbock, Wichita Falls,
OK City

6000 people in the county.

Grew up there, family is still there. I left to go to A&M wondering why anyone would live there. I'd give a lot to move my family back there now.

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Actually the best town in Texas. My children left very young and they still talk about moving back. They are all in their mid 20s now.

I loved that town. Still do. I am from Clarendon but worked in Childress for several years.

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What's the business in Childress? I always wondered that when driving through with my family between Amarillo and DFW as a kid. We ALWAYS stopped in Childress for gas or McDonalds - what's the hotel for? Trucks?

Notice the Panhandle mentioned before, and its pretty obvious I'm one of those weirdos who is quite content here.

I do worry about the future, as the Ogallala aquifer continues to decline. The previous decline, combined with continued mechanization of farms is bringing the farm population even further down. Most counties have 25% of the 1960s farm land base in CRP, and most is never coming out.

The big towns, Amarillo and Lubbock, and the towns near them, will probably continue to thrive. They no longer depend purely on Agriculture for their trade and jobs. The further you get out from them, the less chance you have of the small towns growing. Many will decline.

Those that do remain will just get sadder. My old hometown is about the same population as when I was a kid, but the businesses have all but disappeared. Two lumber yards then vs. none now, four grocery stores vs. one, hospital closed, no more dentist offices, three or four auto shops vs. one, etc. etc. etc.

There's a big difference in the town in the 60s, where a lot of the citizens were owner-operators of farms and businesses, as opposed to now, when only a handful are, the rest work for wages, mostly in the bigger towns. And the business district is a ghost town, as opposed to when mom did almost all her shopping in our town, and a shopping trip to the county seat 12 miles away was A Very Big Deal. Going 35 miles to Lubbock was Even Bigger.

It's just a sad little shell of what it once was.

Now, if you want to find an area with small town that will remain small, I'd look off the caprock to the east of Lubbock and Amarillo. You can have small towns, and if you don't mind an hour or 90 minute drive to see a doctor, you're good.

These towns hit their peaks in the 1930s, as people developed farms in the area. But the climate and terrain is marginal for farming, and most of the farms have long since gone back to pasture. Probably more money comes from hunting than farming these days.

The row of counties just off the cap to the east of Amarillo and Lubbock are (from N-S), Carson, Armstrong, Briscoe, Floyd, and Crosby. Collectively, their population has dropped from 40,095 in 1930, to an estimated 15,629 today. A decline of 61% in the last 90 years. Texas, as a whole, as grown by 400% in the same time period.

Further east is even worse. Hall County (Memphis, Texas) shows an 80% population drop from the 1930s until today.

There is little prospect of them coming back in 20 years.

But I'm not a total pessimist. I think there is a chance that the Covid-19 crisis may even lead to positive things for small towns. For those who avoid the Politics Board, I started a thread over there discussing just that. Link is below, and I'll quote my OP below to save you from going over there. Although I think the entire discussion has some good points that readers of this thread would enjoy reading.

https://texags.com/forums/16/topics/3104493

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Possibly an uplifting discussion, since we're all sitting around doing nothing...

The last 100 years, and especially since the end of WWII, rural America has been decaying. Simple economics and technology drive this change. It takes one man now to farm what 10-20 men farmed when I was a kid. Their wives work off the farm, and shop at the mega-box stores in large towns, where they probably work, as well.

My little hometown of 2,000 had a hospital, a dentist, three doctors, two lumber yards, six or seven gas stations, three grocery stores, etc. etc. when I was a kid. Now they have an Allsups and a Dollar General, serving a population of still around 2,000. Travel is easy and cheap, and the Box Stores win on pricing. So I get it.

Will the present crisis begin a reversal?

You can get groceries and almost every other need delivered to your door. Your kids can be educated online. You can likely do your job online. If you have a small shop building a product, those delivery trucks would be happy to go home full of the products you sell online.

Land, homes, and buildings are cheap and available.

Right now, would you rather be in some tiny town in Central or NW Texas, or downtown Houston?

If enough people start moving back to the small towns, would the stores and hospitals reopen?

Maybe I'm full of crap, but I'm thinking 100 widely scattered towns of 10,000 population is a better lifestyle choice than one town of a million.


Fire away!

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My big concern with that is people moving to these rural ag towns for a slower life, and then being dismayed when they find out farming makes a lot of noise and can be generally unpleasant at times, as we've discussed in the flying thread. Fort Bend County used to be great farmland and there's still quite a bit, but between lawsuit threats and TDA complaints you're seeing farming slowly choked out. I have a standing policy of refusing any Ft Bend work, and just about every other ag pilot does the same. A TDA rep told me they field more complaints out of Ft Bend than anywhere else in the state combined, and almost all are unsubstantiated.

There's always room to improve and ag as a whole has done a great job of cleaning itself up, but people moving out of town have to understand that's it's a give and take relationship. Don't be surprised if an ag plane wakes you up at 6 am or a tractor is still running after midnight.

McDadeTXAggie said:

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I think many people in McDade thought it would stay small and it still is. McDade also had a school that went from kindergarten to 6th grade when I was growing up. Now it has a high school and a football team. Elgin and Bastrop have grown considerably through the years. I fully expect McDade to have a 2 or 3A high school during my lifetime.

Some of the surrounding ranches near my parents have been sold and broken into 10 acre or so plots. These plots have new homes on them. It's just weird everytime I visit seeing it all.

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My grandfather grew up in McDade. We've held a few family reunions there over the years. I've always though of moving there at some point. For the foreseeable future though, divorce decree keeps me in DFW.

Mr. AGSPRT04 said:

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One Dairy Queen, preferably not remodeled

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Ideally a dairy queen with real plates.

zachsccr said:

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If more than half the city's revenue is generated from speeding tickets.

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None of our city revenue is generated from speeding tickets -- we don't have a police force to write speeding tickets.

Small towns used to exist based on their proximity to cheap agricultural land and other natural resources such as timber to cut, minerals to mine and quarry, oil or gas to extract, or waterways for shipping.

The decline of small towns has largely been due to technology advancements and mechanization of labor as well as the decline of those natural resources or the market for them (timber / oil / gas)

The rebirth of some small towns is following the demand for inexpensive and pretty places to retire and recreate as well as through tourism. For example: Round Top, Johnson City, Jefferson, Marfa, etc.

Take a small Texas town, promote tourism and small business (BBQ, micro breweries, coffee shops, boutique, antique shops), provide good infrastructure and political support for development expansion, encourage healthcare facility improvement and old people and millennial's might just flock there.

Some small towns will continue to decline and others will explode for reasons mentioned above.

The Childress economy is, basically
1. Farming
2. District Highway Department
3. Prison
4. Hospital
5. School
6. Hunting
7. Highway stops

The hotels are for all the DFW, San Antonio, Austin, and Houston folks that want to stop halfway to Colorado to spend the night. Also, there is usually a large infrastructure construction project in the area (wind turbines, solar farm, highways, etc) that fill up the hotels and help feed the economy.

Dang, I miss living there.

Round Top and Johnson City "Grow" because rich people in Houston and Austin can get an opportunity to have a hobby farm/ranch without having to drive more than 30min. That doesn't drive the growth you are describing because they are not residents in the typical sense. Round Top has ~100 residents so the only thing that is experiencing explosive growth there is the price of land.

I should add that I don't have any issues with people doing this. I would almost certainly do the same thing if I won the lottery tomorrow. Just that this does not drive the kind of growth in the small communities that we are describing (schools, commerce, and health care etc.)

Probably gonna be landlocked. Down here on the Gulf Coast it's gonna be hard for some of these towns to get bigger.

Also, why do the leaders of communities want to grow? I understand that it increases the tax base. However, it seems like the citizens want to get bigger so they can get a Chili's or Buffalo Wild Wings. LOL! With that comes more traffic, crime and all the other bad things.

I also think its the egos of these leaders. "I was able to get Taco Cabana to plant in our town."

Because if a little is good, more is better. It's like de-wormer.

rlb28 said:

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Probably gonna be landlocked. Down here on the Gulf Coast it's gonna be hard for some of these towns to get bigger.

Also, why do the leaders of communities want to grow? I understand that it increases the tax base. However, it seems like the citizens want to get bigger so they can get a Chili's or Buffalo Wild Wings. LOL! With that comes more traffic, crime and all the other bad things.

I also think its the egos of these leaders. "I was able to get Taco Cabana to plant in our town."

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You're either growing or dying.

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It's a small town when you give directions based on where people live because you don't know the street names.

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We often referred to farms by former owners. "Go past the old Johnson place..." Except the Johnsons died in 1954, and the house was torn down in 1973...

And we also used directions. We had the north place and the west place. Then got one further west than the west place, and called it the Mayfield farm since that was the closest comunity.

Duncan Idaho said:

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Mr. AGSPRT04 said:

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One Dairy Queen, preferably not remodeled

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Ideally a dairy queen with real plates.

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Our Dairy Queen was recently remodeled.

East Texas. Groveton, TX; Trinity County Seat.

A town that can't even support a Dairy Queen (went out of business 20+ years ago. Has a Brookshire Brothers. One family owned diner. Was built on logging and agriculture and is located on US Highway 287. Has been 1500 people or less for all of my life and then some. Yet has produced Rodney Thomas and Super Bowl Champ Lane Johnson and a few 2A State Titles. Also where Cody Johnson went to high school.

That's how I define a small town.

Mr. AGSPRT04 said:

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One Dairy Queen, preferably not remodeled

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This.

I'm pretty sure it's in the Texas Constitution.

One Dairy Queen = Town
Two or more = City

Old dairy queens converted into nail salons or other establishments don't count.

CanyonAg77 said:

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Quote:

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It's a small town when you give directions based on where people live because you don't know the street names.

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We often referred to farms by former owners. "Go past the old Johnson place..." Except the Johnsons died in 1954, and the house was torn down in 1973...

And we also used directions. We had the north place and the west place. Then got one further west than the west place, and called it the Mayfield farm since that was the closest comunity.

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I used to give directions on how to get to a nearby town by including "turn west where the schoolhouse (a one room school for grades 1-6) used to be" in the directions until someone pointed out that there are people who don't know where the schoolhouse used to be.

CanyonAg77 said:

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Quote:

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It's a small town when you give directions based on where people live because you don't know the street names.

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We often referred to farms by former owners. "Go past the old Johnson place..." Except the Johnsons died in 1954, and the house was torn down in 1973...

And we also used directions. We had the north place and the west place. Then got one further west than the west place, and called it the Mayfield farm since that was the closest comunity.

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Up here where everything is in square sections, we still do the 8 north 4 east, 3 south 5 west, type of directions.

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Up here where everything is in square sections, we still do the 8 north 4 east, 3 south 5 west, type of directions.

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Where I grew up in Hale County, two of the old surveys ran together, and were slightly at odds. One was to our north, and you could only go three miles north of the house before the county roads didn't line up anymore. And US87/I-27 cut at a 45 degree angle 2 miles south of the house, so it hosed up going south.

What really freaked people out was that they didn't realize they'd turned 45 degrees before hitting our N-S county road. Freaked them out to tell them to turn north, when they thought they were going north.

Those types of directions worked well for east/west, mostly.

Here in Randall County, Palo Duro Creek and Tierra Blanca Creek interfere with the grid system. Google Maps could never figure out our farm address, which was south of Tierra Blanca. It just lead people to a dead end north of the creek.

No stop light - blinking light only at intersection.

Sasappis said:

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goatchze said:

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Mr. AGSPRT04 said:

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One Dairy Queen, preferably not remodeled

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This.

I'm pretty sure it's in the Texas Constitution.

One Dairy Queen = Town
Two or more = City

Old dairy queens converted into nail salons or other establishments don't count.

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What about a pizza hut converted into a mexican restaurant?

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Also could be something called "China Buffet" which describes both the cuisine and how it's served with incredible efficiency. Very exotic when you forget you are eating in a hollowed-out pizza hut.

To keep small towns alive you want a handful of local specialties on top of agricultural land use to keep a town interesting. A few hidden companies to keep the town financially connected to a second industry and provide options for kids who don't inherit the farm/ranch.

To keep it from growing out of being small those other businesses need to be self sufficient enough so that they can survive outside of a big city industrial support network.

It's hard to stay both small and vibrant.

McDadeTXAggie said:

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I think many people in McDade thought it would stay small and it still is. McDade also had a school that went from kindergarten to 6th grade when I was growing up. Now it has a high school and a football team. Elgin and Bastrop have grown considerably through the years. I fully expect McDade to have a 2 or 3A high school during my lifetime.

Some of the surrounding ranches near my parents have been sold and broken into 10 acre or so plots. These plots have new homes on them. It's just weird everytime I visit seeing it all.

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I grew up in Hutto when it was a 1A town. The surrounding ranches and farmland south of town was sold in the late 90's because there wasn't enough kids wanting to continue in the farming business. Too many families had too many girls and the money for the land was too good to pass up. Now Hutto will be a 6A school next school year.

I grew up in Hemphill. San Augustine had booze and Fairway Farms golf course. You were the big city for us.