Welcome to another episode of Less People. I’m Jenny Russell. Today we’re going to talk about the top five small things that a town can do to become a major draw.
In this season of vacations, some of the best things I learn on vacation are things that I can bring back to our small towns that might work or cool ideas that are out there that we haven’t thought of yet. So I made this list of the top five small things that a town can do to become a major draw based upon our vacation last year to Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. So the first one is wacky rule.
There’s lots of crazy things really. I mean, we have to get creative in rule because you’re not really known for your amenities when you live in rule. You’re known for your people.
So the things that we do have sometimes are a little bit wacky, but that makes us more endearing, correct? So one thing, but everywhere is a little bit wacky depending on where you are in the nation. And one of the things that Seattle, Washington has is the gum wall. So this is a alley that people started putting their used chewing gum on the walls of the alley.
It started in the 1990s when people were leaving a production studio and they would leave their gum on the wall on the outside in the alley and people just started coming and doing that. And now it’s estimated that this attraction receives up to millions of visitors a year. And that’s for a gum wall, a wall of gum.
Yes, you heard it right. A wall of gum. And I talked about this in one of my blog posts.
I mean, especially during COVID times, I’m sure it’s a big, nasty, tainted, very germ filled place. But my kids knew about it. They knew about it from TikTok or YouTube shorts or somewhere.
And they just had to go to the gum wall. Real disgusting, but like I said, wacky and people eat it up, not figuratively, hopefully not licking the wall, but the gum wall. So what other things can you think of in your small town that might be a little wacky, but are very unique? People come to see those things all the time.
A good example of this is Cawker City, Kansas. That’s actually where I went to high school and they have the world’s largest ball of sisal twine. You can’t say it’s the world’s largest ball of twine because there’s a place in Minnesota, I believe, that also claims to be the world’s largest ball of twine.
So the Cawker City, Kansas one is the world’s largest ball of sisal twine. They receive about 200 visitors a month in a town of, I believe it’s probably 500 people now. And this started when a farmer started rolling up twine from his bales.
Every time he took the twine off of bales, he would put it in a roll in his barn and it got bigger and bigger and bigger. And finally he’s like, well, you know, this is a pretty large ball of twine. Maybe I should find a place for it.
So they rolled it out of the barn and they made a spot for it in town. And since then they add to it every year at the twine-a-thon and it has outgrown the structure that it was in and had to be put into a new structure. There’s an actual caretaker of the ball of twine.
You can call her and she’ll come down and let you wind the twine on onto the ball of twine. Or you can come to the twine-a-thon and add twine that time of year. But it just all started with a farmer who started putting his twine into a roll in the barn.
So think of some wacky things that you might have just in your town that are unique and publicize them. You never know what could be wacky rule and get you some major visitors. Number two, the little touches.
We went to one of the national parks up in Northern California, I believe. And, you know, it was beautiful as national parks are. But one of the things that my daughter loved the most was somebody had put a tree, uh, like a tree swing on a branch that hung out over the water of this river.
And we went back there probably four times that day just to sit on that swing. Another example is we used to cut through yards in my small town at grade school if I’d walk somewhere, which wasn’t that often. But somebody had put marbles in their, um, back in their sidewalk in the back of their house.
And I’m sure it said something like the date or their name or something like that. But every time we saw that, we had to stop and look at it. So don’t forget those little touches like the swing on the tree or the marbles in the sidewalk.
Those things that, especially for children, are magical. And as adults are a little bit magical for us as well. So that’s another small thing, a little touch that you can do in your community.
Number three, reinve- reimagine and invest in industrial spaces, especially abandoned industrial spaces. So there are a lot of examples about that right now out there in the world. One of the ones that I, that comes to mind is Magnolia Silos in Waco, Texas.
Of course, they do all kinds of, uh, very fun projects down there. Um, Chip and Joanna Gaines. And they took an industrial area with grain bins and actually made it into shops and an outdoor recreation type of an area where you can hang out on turf and play games and go to the shops and a bakery.
And so if you’ve ever been to Magnolia Silos, or if you’ve never heard of Magnolia Silos, check that out. But Waco is not necessarily a large, huge metropolis of a town. And that is something that most of our rural areas have is grain silos, but we always look at them as grain silos.
We don’t look at them with those dreaming, fresh eyes of what could this be? And how cool could this be if we did something else with it and repurposed it? Another repurposed industrial space that I really liked was the Seattle Walkway. Um, this was an old railroad bridge, or it might’ve actually been a, um, a vehicle bridge that they took you down to the railroad tracks, but they made it into like a elevator that goes up to it. And then that bridge leads you up to the main part of Seattle.
And it was a very well done. They took the railroad area and hotels and different things down by the shipyards. And, you know, it was a very well done thing, but you can tell it was something else before.
Again, something that we all have. We have railroad yards and some of them are not used anymore. So what could that be in your community? What could it now be? The Haymarket District in Lincoln, Nebraska is similar.
It used to be a manufacturing area, uh, kind of loading docks type of an area. And now it’s a main shopping district with restaurants and entertainment. One cool one that’s just coming about this year is the Rock Island Railroad Bridge in Kansas City.
Um, some, some of those statistics about that, it’s a redevelopment of a 1905 railroad bridge, and it’s being repurposed into a public crossing and entertainment hub. It features an upper level event venue that’s going to be called American Royal Hall, and then a river house restaurant and other amenities, amenities like coffee shops, bars, and trailheads. It also has some recreational activities with it, and it includes a levee top trails for walking and biking, docks for kayaking and paddle boarding and zip lines.
And so this is going to be, um, across the Kansas River in Kansas City, Kansas, connecting the West Bottoms and the Armourdale neighborhoods. And it should be open in 2025 here, so sometime this year. So another great example of what could that bridge be that’s not used anymore? I know we don’t all have this amount of money, but we can still do creative things with unexpected places.
All right, so my next point, point number four, tell your story and tell it well. This hit me really at the Piroshky Piroshky Bakery in Seattle, Washington. They had a window to watch the baker make the bread.
They had a vent that vented out to the, to the walkway, to the sidewalk, and that had the smell of the bread baking inside, and it vented it out to the sidewalk. So as you walk by, you smell the bread, and you are definitely drawn in. We actually have a business in Belleville, Kansas that did that.
She makes popcorn, and so the popcorn smelled, she vented it out to the sidewalk, so you can smell popcorn every time you walk by. And I think the people that attend downtown regularly or have a business down there will tell you, darn her when she starts popping that popcorn. I want popcorn all the time, and that’s the point.
So little things like that. They also have a sign on the window telling the story of how the bakery started. So the same window that you can view the baker baking the bread, you can also read the story of how this bakery started and the story of what they do.
So all of those things are very obtainable. Something that you don’t even have to have a ton of money to do. If you have a business that is very capable or compatible with those type of activities, like watching somebody make something or venting a smell out to the sidewalk, those are really attainable subjects to try to work on.
And number five, develop stage two businesses. So this came to mind because when we were in Seattle for vacation, my daughter and I were just out walking, and it was close to closing time for most of the businesses, but one business on this street still had quite a line. I’m like, huh, I wonder what that business is.
As we walked by the line, I kind of looked and thought, well, that looks familiar.They had the old logo from Starbucks, and it was the original Starbucks location in Seattle, Washington, which I never even thought about. I think I did know that Starbucks started in Seattle, Washington, but I had never really thought of the fact that that fact when we were going there.
But what an amazing story, you know, something we now see as a household name. It did start somewhere, and the original store is not big. It’s well attended, but it’s not large.
It’s not all that, I don’t know, I don’t want to say it’s not all that special, but it looks like a regular store, a regular coffee shop that we would all have. But how do they get the way to the way they are now with a nationwide presence? They dreamed big. They probably had some sort of a program that they could go through to help them to to get to that next stage.
And I know the state of Kansas does have like a stage two, stage three type of business development that takes those businesses that are still pretty small, but have a lot of promise and shows them how to translate what they’re doing into scalable and marketable subjects and products and services so that they can grow like a Starbucks eventually. But always dream bigger. See what you have and see what is going well and see if those those businesses can be scaled into something that started as a small coffee shop in Seattle and now is a nationwide product.
And you know, we’re not all going to hit that every time on a rural scale on an everyday scale, but we can all grow and there are promising businesses in your community if you just look at it with a fresh eye. All right, so those are the five small things that a town can do to become a major draw. I’d love to hear what other ideas you have for your small town to become a major draw.
And I hope that you’ve enjoyed this list. Thank you for listening to Less People. I’m Jenny Russell and we hope to see you next time.