Fifty years ago, geography and civics teacher Charles Nathan Anderson started thinking about what makes a small town work. He decided to make a list of the best ones and drove all over the country with a notebook. By 1980, he was just about satisfied—and then his furnace exploded and destroyed all of his work. He started over, and now it’s done: a list of 100 of America’s Best Small Cities (population under 45,000) that he immodestly insists is the best ever. A kindly man, Anderson ranked the first 60 and then alphabetized the rest, so nobody would come in last. Gettysburg, Pa., is No. 1, but we skipped straight to No. 30: nearby Waterloo, Ill. In Missouri, Fulton and Warrensburg made the list, too.
What about all of those computer-generated lists online? They feed the wrong information. Like for climate, they might look at averages. Blue skies and 40 degrees during the day mean a whole lot more than dropping to zero at night.
What’s your most important criterion? A city is no better than its downtown. So many cities have these wonderful malls on the edges, and they just let the downtown go. A city is its center.
How do you make decisions about where to visit? A lot of what I do is cross off cities. I study demographics, economics, housing cost, ahead of time. You can’t do it with just numbers, though. You need to stand in the middle of town and think, “Wow, this is really good” or
“There’s something just not right here.”
What felt just right about Waterloo? I really liked its downtown, built around the courthouse square. Waterloo’s far enough south and west that there’s winter sunshine. It’s close to St. Louis, but out in pretty farm country. And it has its own identity. There are a lot of proud German towns on my list, and Dutch and Swedish.
How does your own town, Winter Haven, Fla., stack up? [He laughs.] It’s not on the list. The summers are too hot and too long.
