Not really about books, but in earlier years, PG lived in some isolated locations and has remained interested in that topic.
From Mental Floss:
The place to go when you want to get away from it all, The Washington Postreports, is Glasgow, Montana. About 4.5 hours from the nearest city, it’s about as close as you can get to “the middle of nowhere” in the contiguous U.S. while still being in a decently-sized town.
Glasgow’s isolated status was determined in a study from Oxford University published in the journal Nature [PDF]. Scientists at the Malaria Atlas Project, a part of Oxford’s Big Data Institute, wanted to use geography and demographic data to see which towns qualify as truly being in the middle of nowhere. For the study, a town was defined as having a population of at least 1000, and a metropolitan area as having 75,000 residents or more.
After crunching the numbers on the elevation levels, transportation options, and terrain types around America, they were able to say roughly how long it would take for someone to traverse any given square kilometer of land in the country. If you’re one of the 3363 people living in Glasgow, which is nestled in northeastern Montana, it would take you between 4 and 5 hours to drive to the nearest metro area. That entire corner of the state lays claim to the title of Middle of Nowhere, U.S.A. Scobey, Montana, less than 100 miles from Glasgow, is the second most isolated small town in the country, and Wolf Point, less than 50 miles away, takes third place.
Link to the rest at Mental Floss
Here’s a link to show you where the Glasgow located in Montana is.
Glasgow is a railroad town where two trains stop each day. It is reported that the train station is closed at all times other than when the trains arrive and depart.
Here’s a photo:
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PG says Glasgow may be a long way from any city of 75,000, but this photo would have represented rush hour in some of the little towns in which he has lived.
I live 20 some miles from Scobey, Montana. Scobey and Glasgow, Montana both have hospitals. There is a ranch west of me that has the moniker “Edge of the World Ranch” , guess it befitting of this Middle of No Where hoopla. Isolation builds character and characters.
I’m fascinated by this. I assume it was named after our very own huge, sprawling, friendly, beautiful, edgy ‘gallus’ Glasgow? One of my favourite places. Although you don’t have to travel very far from that city to find yourself in all kinds of other places that could arguably call themselves the ‘middle of nowhere’!
Legend has it that the towns along the railroad were named by someone in the railroad office spinning a globe. Glasgow is only an hour away from Malta, which is ninety minutes from Havre, which is not far from Kremlin.
James J. Hill, a Canadian, was the person who built The Great Northern Railroad in the northern part of the United States, in the Upper Midwest, Great Plains and Pacific Northwest.
He was very entrepreneurial. According to Wikipedia, “When there was not enough industry in the areas Hill was building, Hill brought the industry in, often by buying out a company and placing plants along his railroad lines.”
The Great Northern operated agencies in Germany and Scandinavia that promoted its lands, and brought families over at low cost. Hill also invested in founding schools and churches for these communities and promoted a variety of progressive techniques to ensure they prospered.
This “Dakota Boom” peaked in 1882 as 42,000 immigrants, largely from northern Europe, poured into the Red River Valley running through the region. The rapidly increasing settlement in North Dakota’s Red River Valley along the Minnesota border between 1871 and 1890 was a major example of large-scale “bonanza” farming.
Hill also pioneered trans-Pacific trade. First, he sold Southern cotton to Japan, then rails for Japanese railroads. He then aggressively expanded trade to other parts of East Asia.
What is their idea of ‘decent’ I ask? I’ve been in smaller places (Although I have driven the Hih-Line through Glasgow. That whole country is pretty empty)
I’d guess “decent” = “more than 1000 people”. But a better metric would probably be “has a hospital”.