A field guide to overlooked towns

People ask how a town qualifies for the catalog, usually while nominating their own. The honest answer is that the bar is low and the standards are high. Low bar: the town has to exist, and people have to live there. High standards: we have to be able to commemorate it the way it deserves, which means finding the one true thing — the landmark, the claim, the weather event — that the town itself would put on the shirt.

Overlooked is not an insult in our catalog. It is a category error made by everyone else. A town is overlooked the way a good diner is overlooked: constantly, by people on their way to something they saw an ad for.

The taxonomy

After forty towns of fieldwork, some genres have emerged. The Mile Zero town, which is the start of something enormous and is treated as a parking lot for it — Dawson Creek begins the entire Alaska Highway and would like you to notice. The Capital-of-Something town, which holds a title of narrow but genuine supremacy: salmon capital, country music capital briefly, sunniest city in the province apparently. The Technicality town, incorporated on a boundary, a parallel, or a surveyor’s rounding error — Ladysmith sits where it sits because of the 49th parallel, and we find that story better than most castles’.

Then there is the Planned town, which is our favorite genre and Kitimat is the type specimen. Kitimat was designed entirely in advance — streets, neighborhoods, the works — by people who believed a town could be drawn before it was lived in. Whether that worked is a question for urbanists. That it was attempted with total sincerity is exactly our department.

What we look for

The research process is unglamorous in a way we feel matches the material. Incorporation dates from municipal records. Populations from the census, rounded honestly and marked approximate. The known-for line is the hard part, because it has to pass two tests at once: the town would agree with it, and a stranger would want to know more. "Mostly farmland" passes for Abbotsford because Abbotsford would shrug and agree, and because it is true in the way that matters — you can smell the agriculture before you can see the town.

What never goes on a shirt: anything a town would wince at. The humor lives in the sincerity or it does not live here. A slogan shirt that reads "I survived winter in Winnipeg" works because every person in Winnipeg has earned it and knows it. A slogan that punches at the town instead of standing in it would not survive our first meeting, and there is only one of us in that meeting.

Nominate accordingly

The waitlist drives the whole print schedule — enough requests and a town jumps the queue, which means the catalog is ultimately written by homesick people, which is the correct authorship. When you submit yours, include the one thing it is known for. You know what it is. It is usually not the thing on the highway sign. It is the thing you would point at, driving in, when you said: that’s us.