Beaver Dam: The Quintessential Small Town

Something that’s always irked me when I’m watching TV or a movie that prominently features a small town is how rarely the fake small towns match up with my own experiences. It’s not that they keep making the characters from these small towns act like a bunch of ignorant yokels who barely managed to master reading before quitting school to work on the farm or become coal miners. We’ve all gotten so used to that attack on our reputations we occasionally lean into it as a joke. None of us really care that the small towns on TV are full of super-friendly people who can’t help but be a little nosey about newcomers from the city – a stereotype like that just makes it easier to lull visitors into a false sense of security before we ask to borrow their stuff. No, the stereotype I hate the most in fictional small towns is just how big they seem to end up being! There will always be some character who moved to the big city moaning and complaining about how they grew up out in the sticks where everyone is backwards and only one step above cavemen, but then they’ll say the population of their hometown was in the thousands or that there was a county fair. Perhaps my view of things has been tainted by a life lived in the middle of nowhere, but that doesn’t sound like a small town to me. If your town has several chain restaurants, a police force with membership in at least the double digits, a fire department that isn’t entirely composed of volunteers, and buildings above six stories tall I don’t think there’s anything small about it. Then again those are just my opinions, and I consider myself a man of science and learning. In order to verify my views on what exactly counts as a small town I did a quick google search for official definitions. No one really seemed to agree (at least on the first page of results, the only page anyone cares about) but Wikipedia informs me that a town is commonly defined as anywhere with a population below 100,000 people. It also says that a community with less than 1,000 residents counts as a village or a tribe at best, which describes literally every town I’ve ever lived in. Seeing as using the term tribe feels disrespectful to those who already use it (and implies a level of near-familial relationship with my area’s inhabitants I don’t want to claim) I’ve begun to relabel what I thought of as small towns as villages in my head. That’s right – I’m a villager, and proud of it.

Whether or not I’m the village idiot is for the people to decide at the polls.

Even if I’ve often found it to be silly or misleading, there’s something about the Hollywood ideal of small town life that people find appealing. Cities aren’t inherently awful, but so much of their infrastructure is designed with cars in mind that just walking down the street feels like a chore and on top of that the cost of living is prohibitively expensive. Plus, everyone’s got so much going on in their own lives that they can end up being a little rude when interacting with their fellow man. Suburbia is a little nicer and the people are a bit more interconnected with their community, but at times this interconnectedness can become a bad thing. Homeowners’ Associations have a tendency to take on lives of their own in such places as power goes to the heads of people who probably don’t get their way in any other part of their life. Deviation from the norm is punished in many suburban neighborhoods, and while there are times it really is for the good of others (warnings about fire hazards during a drought, for example) I’ve heard some horror stories about HOAs that will find any reason to punish those who don’t toe the line. Small towns as seen on TV are free from both the congestion of city life and the pushy neighbors of the suburbs, and on top of that they’re full of quirky things to do and see! As the technology to let more of us work from home advances there’s been a steady trickle of people deciding to return to rural America. That doesn’t mean those people want to lose access to conveniences like coffee shops, chain restaurants, and supermarkets though, so many actual small towns (or villages, hamlets, tribes, etc) are getting passed over in favor of medium sized towns that can match the traits that Hollywood’s portrayals promised. Although a small part of my heart feels betrayed by people not flocking to my community of several hundred, I don’t feel too bad. In fact, I thought I’d help by providing a quick example of a town I believe encapsulates the Hollywood-style small town. Put on your traveling hats, folks, we’re going on a Vibe Tour!

It’s been a while since I’ve had an excuse to use this bad boy!

Beaver Dam is located in Dodge County, Wisconsin, and although it’s referred to as a city its population is below 17,000 as of the 2020 census so it still counts as a town. It was founded in 1841 and named for an old beaver dam on a stream leading into the Beaver Dam River. I couldn’t find anything about whether the river was called that before the town was founded, but the Chippewa name for the area before that also translates as beaver dam so it wouldn’t surprise me. Two men named Thomas Mackie and Joseph Goetschius were the first white settlers according to my incredibly limited research, but they weren’t alone for long. By 1843 there were 100 people living in the town, and it incorporated as a city in 1856. That was the same year the Milwaukee Railroad made them a stop on the railway network, which caused the population to boom since people didn’t have to walk to town and they could ship in goods easier. Side note: if you’re ever reading an old historical record and wondering how important railroads were to a community, the automatic answer is very important. All that history may seem like an odd thing to bring up when I was just talking about finding the perfect stereotypical small town, but it serves a purpose. Nearly every show set in a small town will at some point show a statue of their founder, describe the story behind whatever folksy-sounding name the writers came up with, and cheer on the local sports team’s animal mascot. Aside from the statue part I’ve just checked all those boxes, and anyone deciding on where to move based on cuteness of mascot will have added beavers to the list.

Note: I’ve never actually seen a beaver in the area of Beaver Dam, so don’t get your hopes too high.

A quaint bit of history related to the founding of the community is only one component in a TV-style small town, but it’s the access to amenities that truly rural communities don’t have that makes them appealing to former city folks. Beaver Dam’s got that covered too, and all without losing that slightly shabby look that makes everyone visiting think we still live like it’s the first Bush administration. There’s a movie theater, a couple hotels, a handful of motels (whose signs still proudly boast about color TVs), an assortment of chain stores and restaurants, a Walmart, multiple options in the field of physical therapy, an eye doctor, a dental surgeon, a hospital, at least one pet store, various public parks, a lake, and a great library. Their library was so great that they used to have to send away most of their collection to other libraries in the south central library network to fill holds, and when they finally got sick of that they cut themselves off from everyone else. Now if you want to check out a book from Beaver Dam’s collection you need to actually go there, and the same holds true for returning books. It made visiting there fun when I was a kid, but now that I’m a librarian it kind of stinks. My library could fit inside their children’s section at least twice, and rather than share the wealth they chose to go solo. On the bright side they have a big enough parking lot that you can easily visit without feeling like you’re intruding. Speaking of cars, if someone moving into town from the city doesn’t have one (it happens) there’s one or two lots where you can buy a vehicle in Beaver Dam that seem to be doing pretty well despite the town’s relatively small population meaning most people already have a car.

Not as well as this guy did, but still pretty well.

Beaver Dam’s a place with history, amenities, and a library gone rogue, but that’s only the stuff that we all recognize a stereotypical Hollywood small town needs. What no one fully realizes a small town fit for TV needs is some wacky details to spice up the lives of the residents. What good would Mayberry be if there wasn’t some Church choir for Barney Fife to ruin with his bad singing? Would Bailey Pickett from The Suite Life on Deck have been as interesting if her stories about Kettlecorn, Kansas didn’t include corn carnivals and swap meets? People expect their small town experiences to be quirky and memorable, even if they don’t consciously realize it. They want something they can do and then brag about to their friends, like a polar plunge or a pie eating contest. The library is a good start, but there’s plenty more where that comes from. There’s Cabin Fever Fest in January, the Swan City Classic Car Show on Father’s Day, the “Taste of Wisconsin” beer and cheese tasting event the day before that, a craft fair the second weekend of July, the Dodge County Fair in August, and the suitably bizarre Midwest Cream Cheese Competition in November. If you like your small towns to have mysteries in them or secret societies to join after watching too many episodes of Stranger Things you can always go bother the Freemasons in their Dodge County lodge at the edge of town. Just don’t go there expecting some sort of super-powerful organization controlling the entire area, the place looks more like a DMV than the seat of power for the shadowy elite.

I’ve seen Baptist Churches more threatening than this.

If the Freemasons leave you feeling underwhelmed, there’s locations more impressive both architecturally and influentially scattered across the region. There’s Wayland Academy, a private boarding high school that’s been around in one form or another since 1855 and has a long-standing tradition where seniors hide an axe on campus in the spring for the juniors to find before time runs out in order to win relaxed dress code for a week. A mysterious school that’s well over 100 years old is bound to have a lot more drama than the Freemasons’ glorified dentist’s office, and on top of that it also hosted a German POW camp for one summer in 1944 with a population of 300 living in tents. If looking for mysteries on an active school campus isn’t your cup of tea you could always check out the Williams Free Library. It was the original town library with a collection that was founded in 1884, and it was also the original public library for the entire country. By that I mean it was the first public library in the United States to have open stacks where anyone could pick out their own books. The building is an architectural marvel straight out of a movie, and even though it was replaced by a more modern library in 1985 (101 years isn’t a bad run) the structure still sees use as a town museum. By visiting you’re not just contributing to the preservation of local history, you’re also completing yet another item on the stereotype checklist – the dusty old building full of clues about the town’s largely-forgotten history. Or you could just go for the easy bit of history and stop at the streets they used to film Public Enemies back in 2009.

I honestly forgot this movie existed, and I was in town while they were filming.

Small towns are rarely exactly like they’re portrayed on TV or in the movies. Sometimes they’re poorer, or emptier, or even less friendly. That doesn’t make them bad places to live, or even to just visit. If you ever find yourself watching something about rural American communities and wishing you could visit a place like that, you could do a lot worse than Beaver Dam. Is it perfect? No. Will the people next door welcome you to the neighborhood with baked goods and a smile? Possibly, but don’t count on it. It’s the kind of place you can just sort of wander through finding spots to visit you didn’t know you would find interesting, and it’s a spot where you don’t have to look hard to find a story. Just remember that if you’re in the neighborhood you should also make the time to check out the local villages. They might be electing a new idiot soon and I could use the votes.

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