An interesting depiction of the rural South

You can find it in the lede to this NYT story out of Midland City, Alabama, the story about the apparently mentally ill Vietnam vet who has kidnapped a five-year-old and is holding the child in an underground bunker.  The man took the child, who has no known connection to him, after killing the bus driver who was transporting the child on Tuesday.

The headline is "Small Town in Alabama Confronts Boy's Kidnapping," and the lede follows:

Many things hold little Southern towns together. There is a common love of the region, the peace that comes with a rural life and, often, prayer. 

In this town of 2,300 in the heart of peanut country, people drew on all of those as they endured what by Thursday night had stretched into an unimaginable situation.

While this story lists the population of Midland City as 2,300, wikipedia lists it as 1,703.  Surrounding Dale County has a population of 50,044, and is part of the Enterprise-Ozark Micropolitan area.