The 10 Smallest Towns in Massachusetts

Growing up in the suburbs of Boston, I always considered the SouthCoast to be a fairly small community. For a media guy like me, it definitely has that small-town feel.

I once had a professor teach me that even when delivering media in a big city, it is super important to break it down to make it seem like a tight-knit community.

"The radio greats can make New York City seem like five blocks," he said.

As small and quaint as the SouthCoast feels at times, we're really not all that small. As I'm sure you know, New Bedford and Fall River are each roughly right around that 100,000 people mark for population. We'll get a much better sense of where the two cities rank in the near future now that the data has been collected for the 2020 census.

As it stands now, Fall River and New Bedford are both top 10 cities for population in Massachusetts. New Bedford comes in slightly bigger, with a rank of No. 7 and an estimated population of 95,000 versus Fall River's 10th-ranked 90,000 people.

This is why the census was so critical in 2020. There is a bunch of government funding that has a cutoff for cities under 100,000. If we can boost those numbers to over 100,000 it could mean big things for both cities.

With that being said, as I was reviewing the population data in our area, I was shocked to see that even the smallest towns on the SouthCoast are booming metropolises compared to some of the smallest in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Marion is the smallest community on the SouthCoast with roughly 5,000 people, Rochester has about 5,700, and Mattapoisett is close with 6,400.

Pretty small, right? Not so much when you compare them to the smallest of them all: