> Meant to simulate a town with a population of 35,000—about the size of Bennington, Vermont
because we all know how big Bennington is.
because we all know how big Bennington is.
Take a look at the list of big cities and see how many you know: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_proper_by_popula...
after poking around on google maps, most historical towns are quite large now (roanoke, va and plymouth, ma are at least double that size).
bangor, maine is right around 30k. i bet most have at least heard of that town.
most of the famous little towns in the south like savannah, tuscaloosa, galveston are 50-120k+ population. key west is 25k though. with tourists in town i'm guessing it's right near 30k. there's also some really small towns by it that are probably not counted in the city population.
i think you'd be hard pressed to find a more famous 30k population town than key west. i'm willing to bet nearly every adult in the US has heard of the place, and has a pretty good idea in their head what it looks/feels like in terms of population.
(This is not a well known place, but one of its schools was in "Saved by the Bell" so there's a tenuous pop culture link.
Wikipedia has several lists of US cities and, being polite, they tend to obscurity at the latter half of the lists. And those are places with over 100,000 people. My town - Cheltenham UK - has about 100,000 people.
So, how do you give an idea of how big a town for 35,000 people is? Number of high schools? Number of Starbucks? The article lists one church. A UK equivalent might list twelve pubs.
(my niece fibbed to me and said it was in "Greece" - something I believed for years. She also told me "oh yeah Deerhoof, they all went to my school" which is also totally untrue.)
It's about twice that.