Measured by Mayberry.

• Author: Bailey, David
• Position: North Carolina's municipalities

Mount Airy, the place that inspired America's mythic small town, deals with reality while trying to live up to the legend.

Tom Webb, the former grants administrator for Mount Airy, recalls an assignment an English prof at Appalachian once gave his class: Write a detailed description of your hometown, long enough to cover the subject but as succinct as possible.

"I wrote one word, 'Mayberry,' and got an A," he says. "It was one of the few A's awarded."

"Life in Mayberry mirrors the best qualities of any small town," writes Richard Kelly in his book The Andy Griffith Show. "Despite the constant reminders that the setting is North Carolina, Mayberry is really Small Town, U.S.A."

Mount Airy, of course, has first claim. The well-funded and active Surry Arts Council is built around the Andy Griffith Playhouse, named for its most-famous son. The Snappy Lunch serves pork-chop sandwiches, just as it did on the series, and you can still get a haircut at Floyd's Barbershop downtown. Every September, Mount Airy celebrates Mayberry Days, when hundreds of fans tear themselves away from the 249 reruns of the series long enough to sample a town that was once described as doing its darndest to imitate an imitation of itself.

But, in other ways, it is not the same place Andy Griffith left in 1944. Residents say he rarely visits the mill town he grew up in. Maybe that's because it's been replaced by a diversified manufacturing center where Goober and Gomer would have a hard time fitting in. Since Andy left, Mount Airy has acquired an interstate highway, a bypass, two golf courses, two industrial parks, a jetport and a set of manufacturers whose perspective is more global than local. Some months, its retail sales exceed Chapel Hill's.

Still, it's not a quirk that Mayberry, the quintessential small town, was nurtured on Tar Heel turf. Andy Griffith grew up in a state that does not have an Atlanta or a Boston or an Indianapolis. In fact, no state in the union has a smaller percentage of its people living in a single urban center. Small towns are the state's specialty.

North Carolina's municipalities average about 6,300 residents -- and that's after figuring in the Charlottes and Raleighs. Four hundred and eighty have fewer than 15,000 residents. Another way of looking at it is, 92% of the incorporated towns have 15,000 or fewer people, 83% of them have fewer than 5,000, and 69%, fewer than 2,500.

The reasons are historical, Wake Forest University history professor Paul Escott says. "The small size and scattered nature of the textile industry helps account for the prevalence of small towns in the state," he explains. In the 1800s, mills were built along rivers and creeks that provided them power. Some were built in farming communities that preceded them, others in places where villages grew up around them.

"A lot of these early factories were very small, some capitalized for no more than $50,000 in stock, and didn't have to operate in large settings," Escott says. So the mill villages didn't wither and die when electricity unleashed the looms from their dependency on water power. They grew into mill towns, where owners became mill lords, exercising considerable control over local government and their employees' private lives. And the rural setting suited the workers just fine: Most had been farm folk, forced into factories by hard times.

But neither they nor their children nor their children's children ever lost their affinity for what they had left. Though they pulled their...