Hometown Histories: Personal Stories from Small Towns
I live in a small town. Thirty-five hundred people, give or take. What do we love about small towns? It’s lovely here. There’s a sweet town center with a hardware store, a tiny serve yourself ‘grocer’ stocked with local goods and a self-pay box. They recently added Venmo for those of us who never seem to have cash. There are a couple of restaurants. There’s a lovely lake with a town beach and picnic pavilion. The town recently put up a fence to keep out non-town folks, which to my mind is not a sign of progress. But the lake is well cared for with efforts to keep down the invasive plant species. People fish and kayak and swim and bask in the delights of summer. This is a no-wake lake so it is quiet.
Most folks don’t lock their doors and many times I have seen people leave their cars running when they go into a shop for a quick errand. Lots of people know your name, or maybe recognize your face. I like the pace. I love the trees and the skies. I love hearing the roar of the night critters and knowing that bears and other creatures are in the perimeters - not too far off in the woods. Sometimes we see our furry neighbors and that gives me some hope for their persistence on this planet.
This town has lots of stories. It’s full of small town stories. It’s full of hometown history, hometown stories. Take any of the details I mentioned above and anyone in town could tell you 10 stories about it. Everyone could talk about the tiny grocer or the lake or the hardware store. Everyone could talk about the restaurants or the bears or not locking their houses. They could talk about a thousand things that I didn’t even mention - the cows, the kids who ride their dirt bikes too fast, or the corn, the songs of the peepers at night, snapping turtles crossing the road. They could talk about the annual fairs, the snow, their favorite local doctor. And then, like any small town, they can talk about each other, the local politics, the national politics, the ways they want the town to stay the same, the ways they want it to change and the ways to keep either of those things from happening. They can talk about school, the teachers, the sports teams.
Ask anyone here and they all have a thousand stories - if you can get them to talk. We all have so many stories but they don’t come to mind right away. If you ask them they’ll say, “Oh, I don’t have any stories.” But then, one person at dinner or a bar or at the beach will remember the time that Joey had that accident, and will tell the story and then everyone adds something and then someone else tells another story. These stories are all there for the telling. We all have wonderful stories that all told would fill this website with the color and magic of wherever it is we live. Our little towns won’t be in history books. They’re just little farming towns, or manufacturing towns or tourist towns, all filled with people living everyday lives. But it’s the stories that live beneath the surface - inside our heads in our memories - that bring those towns to life. We hold the keys to those towns. We hold the memories, the living, the dying, the loving in our minds and when we share those stories, we give the gift of those towns to the world.
In 2026, America is celebrating its 250th birthday - the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. To celebrate that birthday, the effort is underway to gather stories of life in America. This fall, History Chip is pitching in to that effort. We are starting by celebrating all the towns in Connecticut. With the Connecticut Storytelling Rave, we are asking for every town in Connecticut to get its residents involved in opening up their memories and sharing those precious stories. We are looking for 10,000 of those wonderful stories about town fairs, and floods and snow and fires and grandmoms and working in factories and farming. We are asking everyone in that little state to share their stories, to bring each of those towns to life as only they can. Sharing their little stories about their shops, their schools, what they have seen out their windows. These stories about small towns bring our towns, our lives to life. These stories are treasures. These stories may seem small, but they matter. And the towns may be small but these small towns are big stories. They matter. Your stories matter. They are the stuff of our world.
Jean McGavin
Founder, History Chip