The 20 Best Small Towns in America
From the Berkshires to the Cascades, we've crunched the numbers and pulled a list some of the most interesting spots around the country
- By Susan Spano and Aviva Shen
- Smithsonian magazine, May 2012
Accordion player Tor Stumo, 13, is in harmony with Great Barrington’s acoustic music tradition. (Jason Houston)
Big-city smart meets New England natural in an art-rich mountain setting.
You’ve got to slow down when Route 7 leaves behind the wide-open valley of the Housatonic River to enter Great Barrington. The road becomes Railroad Street there, right of way to pedestrians stalled in the crosswalk trying to decide whether to have sushi or chimichangas for dinner. Others carry yoga mats, bags of farmers market produce, books, CDs, double espressos and all the other stuff it’s hard to find in surrounding Berkshire Mountain villages like Stockbridge and Lenox.
Compared with them, Great Barrington (pop. 6,800) is like a big city where you can get anything you want, to borrow the chorus from “Alice’s Restaurant Massacree,” by hometown boy Arlo Guthrie. He was 18 when he wrote the satirical ballad about true events on Thanksgiving Day 1965, when he got arrested for illegally dumping some of Alice’s trash, ultimately making him ineligible for the Vietnam War draft. Trinity Church, former abode of the celebrated Alice, is now the Guthrie Center, a stage for folk music, starting point of the annual “Historic Garbage Trail Walk” and a place for interfaith spiritual exchange in a town where there could be something contrarian in the water.
Or in the food. At the forefront of the big-chain-grocery-store-defying, eat-local movement, Great Barrington is devoted to its family farms, farmers markets and co-op. Berkshire Grown, an organization that promotes the production and marketing of locally grown food, spreads the word with lectures by writers like Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma and most recently Food Rules).
Great Barrington’s latest unconventional endeavor is to mint its own currency, an experiment launched in 2006 aimed at getting people to buy everything—not just food— local. Almost 400 businesses in the area trade BerkShares bills; the 5 BerkShares note features W.E.B. Du Bois, the great African-American author and educator whose boyhood home just west of town is a National Historic Landmark.
Incorporated in 1761, around the same time as Stockbridge and Lenox, Great Barrington, too, attracted rich summer people who built Gilded Age mansions like Searles Castle, now a boarding school. But Great Barrington grew up as a mill and railroad center, its blue-collar ring never excised. About 125 miles from New York City, it attracts a hip crowd from the Big Apple, along with New Englanders and recent immigrants from Asia and Mexico.
“Great Barrington is a small, manageable, economically and ethnically mixed town. That’s what I love about it,” says locally renowned Northeast Public Radio director and commentator Alan Chartock, who proudly lives in a house once owned by one of the judges at the Lizzie Borden trial.
When passenger trains still stopped in town, they brought performers from New York, booked to appear at the Mahaiwe, a vintage 1905 vaudeville theater. Now lovingly restored, it offers a year-round schedule of jazz, rock, dance, lectures and HD broadcasts from London’s National Theater and New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Executive Director Beryl Jolly, who came to Great Barrington from New York’s Public Theater, calls it the Mahaiwe Mix, no categories excluded, for the whole “big mix of people you see walking down Railroad Street.”
Early summer brings the Berkshire International Film Festival to the Triplex Cinema, and classical music performed on historic instruments to the Aston Magna Festival at the Bard College Simon’s Rock campus. Not to mention such famous cultural institutions as Tanglewood, Shakespeare & Company, the Norman Rockwell Museum and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival just a country drive away.
Then there’s the frame that nature put around the picture, with 1,642-foot Monument Mountain to the east and the rest of the Berkshires to the west—such cozy mountains! Orchards are sheer walls of pink in the spring, farm fields thick with corn in the summer. Fall leaf-peepers train cameras on golden oaks and crimson maples. Honking geese pass over ice-coated bogs and ponds in the watershed of the Housatonic River. All this, and bagels, too. Arlo got it right. -- Susan Spano
Read how these towns were selected.
Comments (818)
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I can't help but think the original photo is from Fairhope, Alabama even though it was not included in your list. You didn't identify that site. Could you, please? Thank you.
Posted by e graham on February 11,2013 | 11:27 AM
Cool.... I'd like to share a soundtrack suited for small towns http://www.theamericanmodern.com/post/42335087342/soundtrack-for-a-small-town. Happy listening!
Posted by Tara on February 5,2013 | 07:56 AM
Taos? It's a filthy place when I was there a few years ago. Garbage everywhere and no one picks anything up. Of course they are artists and picking up garbage is the government's job or something. In Arizona,you see those signs like" The next three miles the Kiwanis Club keeps the highway clean". There are zero near Taos. What a dump.
Posted by John Galt on February 2,2013 | 11:49 AM
I thought this might be a credible list of towns until I saw Beckley, WV. Someone has lost their mind.
Posted by jt on January 30,2013 | 06:49 PM
http://media.smithsonianmag.com/images/631*421/Small-Towns-Naples-FL-intro-631.jpg looks like my hometown but not on the list. but now i see in the url it says naples, FL so i guess that's what it is.
Posted by nubwaxer on January 29,2013 | 07:50 PM
this website is awesome
Posted by brittany peterson on January 28,2013 | 01:11 PM
this website is awesome
Posted by brittany peterson on January 28,2013 | 01:11 PM
Perhaps you should have the author check a map of Washington State to locate the Olympic Peninsula. I'm sure the people of Bremerton, Port Orchard, Silverdale, Poulsbo and Kingston will be quite amused to find that they've been moved across the Hood Canal with Gig Harbor to the Olympic Peninsula. Gig Harbor is located on the Kitsap Peninsula. The bridges refered to cross the Tacoma Narrows which separates the Kitsap Peninsula from Tacoma.
Posted by R. Rasmussen on January 17,2013 | 02:39 AM
Morton all the way! Yo dawg, I love me did town!
Posted by Carl Colwell on January 11,2013 | 12:50 AM
I have lived near some of these towns; Great Barrington, Brattleboro, Mill Valley. Most people can not afford to live in them. How about a slide show of affordable small towns?
Posted by Jeff and Yo on January 10,2013 | 03:38 PM
This website has proven very useful in my work. You see, I'm an aspiring author, and my first book Dénûment takes place in a small town. I decided to be realistic and use a real place as the location of my story, but I didn't know any small towns. So while researching small towns I came across your website. I'm pleased to say that because if your website I have decided to make my story take place in Laguna Beach. Thank you. -Catie Westphal
Posted by Catie Westphal on January 9,2013 | 02:09 PM
How Naples, FL made the list is beyond me? This town has no character. It is only for the rich and their employees. Don luke in Bradenton, FL.
Posted by donald luke on January 4,2013 | 03:30 PM
New mexico really haves the best little towns in the world i lived there before i wouldint go back because i love the city and fast living but when i get old i will move back
Posted by Jack on December 25,2012 | 09:51 PM
I have returned to Beckley, WV and have lived here for two years and have been pulled over by the poice three tines for no reason and my wife has been pulled over once for a made up reason . Tamarac is nice and so is the Exibition Mine, if you have never been a mine. There are too many city police. There were 14 policeman in 1965 and the population was 21,000, now the popullation is 17,000 and there are about 54 policeman. It is almost like a police state. The Smithsonian has lost creditability with me.
Posted by james Bennet on December 15,2012 | 01:46 PM
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