I shared my piece last week on the small historic town of Culpeper, Virginia on a couple of Facebook groups. Most people liked it; they often like seeing some love for places they know or live in, or alternatively, finding out about neat places they haven’t seen or heard of before. Lots of simple comments like Love Culpeper! or Glad you liked our little town!

One person agreed, “We definitely need future development to contain the mix of commercial and housing, at various price points, that traditional towns had.” One person noted that “some of the changes have been good” (the town came back from a slump in the late postwar era and is now thriving but also pretty boutiqueified). A couple of people thought the town was nice but a little dull. One person even asked ChatGPT commission a poem on Culpeper.

But I also got some critical comments, which are interesting to me not because they’re critical (there’s always someone) but because of the ways in which they’re critical, and what they reveal about how we think about small towns.

In response to one of those “Culpeper is dull” comments, one resident replied “Just how we like it,” and another backed him up.

Someone else took an accusatory tone: “Please don’t send more people here. I saw what Stafford County became, just let us live in peace.” I explained that I also wanted to stop the sprawl from reaching places like this, but he couldn’t really understand the idea of promoting growth closer to the city to preserve the outer places.

One person lamented a sharp increase in crime in recent years.

And I find this one the most interesting: “I was very surprised to hear you describe Culpepper as an urban small town. It must’ve changed drastically in the last 20 years.” To which another replied: “I noticed that, too. What the heck is an ‘urban small town’? There’s definitely sprawl, but the downtown is nice.”

I’m not sure if he thinks the sprawl is evidence for or against the town’s urbanity; I’d say it’s against, but the traditional downtown more than makes up for that; it’s compact, gridded, and features mixed-use, multistory buildings, apartments, small multifamily buildings, and plenty of detached single-family houses too. It’s smaller and less intense than what we’d call a “city,” but its pattern and history is fundamentally urban.

Here’s the core of that point, from the original Culpeper piece:

It is home to timeworn workhorse buildings, of a size and scale that would be far more at home in a block of, say, Brooklyn than in most of American suburbia….

You can take a block of Brooklyn, or Old Town Alexandria, or Colonial Philadelphia—or Culpeper, or Flemington, or Staunton, or Frederick—urban settlements with wildly differing histories and population counts—and their land use is essentially the same. The classification of the city as a beast of its own, and the subsuming of the small town into the suburbs, is a profound, ahistorical error.

So it’s interesting to me how small-town denizens to some extent embrace and feel pride in this history—the extent to which their small settlements were once grander, economically livelier, and more “on the map”—and yet at the same time, to some extent, embrace the dullness, stagnation, and lack of vitality that many small towns face today.

Is it misanthropy? A belief that any sort of new growth will be at odds with the lovely buildings that already exist? A suspicion that growth is a scheme from above, tying in, perhaps, to ideas about a “war on cars” or plans to “ruin the suburbs”? Or is it just the human impulse to hold onto what we know? And if so, can that pride of place be channeled into something other than NIMBYism?

When I say that small towns are urban, I don’t mean that we should turn them into big cities. I mean, first of all, that we should remember how we got them in the first place, and what they really are.

Related Reading:

Occoquan, Virginia’s Embrace of Old and New

300 People and History in Clifton, VA

Canal Sprawl

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