I find this all pretty amusing. I grew up 6 miles outside of a town of 3000. Nobody there even remotely thought of us being anything other than rural. My off-t

I find this all pretty amusing. I grew up 6 miles outside of a town of 3000. Nobody there even remotely thought of us being anything other than rural. My off-the-cuff theory is that the folks that came up with this particular classification lived in some seriously large city such as Washington DC or New York. Let's try this classification. If you can walk from one end of the town to the other in less than an hour. Sibley Iowa spans almost two miles. Hudson, Iowa, mentioned by a comment below, is five miles. Folks who spent much of their life back east (as we used to say) often don't have a clear sense of the scale of geography west of the Hudson. For example. If you measure the end-to-end distance of Montana, that distance from Chicago will land you in Washington DC. Even more so--my professor at the university told of a European colleague who had a little extra time while visiting the US and thought they would take a trip down to Florida then out west. They gave up after Florida after gaining a new appreciation of the geography.