Only Here: how fifty unremarkable towns made themselves into top-tier destinations
Forty-nine lovely towns get driven past. These fifty get talked about.
Why do travelers drive four hours to reach one small town and pass a prettier one at sixty miles an hour? It is almost never the scenery. The towns that win chose one thing to own, committed to it completely, and defended it for decades, until an ordinary place became a destination.
Out August 31, 2026
Only Here
How Fifty Unremarkable Towns Made Themselves Into Top-Tier Destinations
Monaco manufactured glamour out of a nearly broke rock. Leavenworth, Washington, a failing mill town, rebuilt itself as a Bavarian village. A Pennsylvania town of a few thousand runs a national event around a groundhog. Fifty towns that had no natural reason to be a destination and built one anyway.
Pre-order the Kindle, $9.99Delivers to your Kindle on August 31, 2026.See the whole series on Amazon
A few of the fifty
- Leavenworth, Washington. A failing mill town voted to become Bavarian, and meant it.
- Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania. One famous morning a year, turned into a year-round identity.
- Monaco. A nearly broke rock that manufactured glamour and never gave it back.
- Mackinac Island, Michigan. Outlawed the automobile and kept the nineteenth century.
- Cooperstown, New York. A baseball shrine built from an invented origin story.
How each chapter works
Every town gets the same treatment: the situation it started with, the problem that stopped it, what somebody actually did, and what it produced, with the numbers printed and sourced. It reads like the best kind of road trip, the one where you keep asking how a place like this even exists, except this book actually answers.
Who it is for
If you love roadside Americana and the strange history of how tourist towns get made, you will not put it down. If you lead a town, sit on a chamber or tourism board, or work in economic development, it is fifty proofs that the pattern is available to any community willing to do the work.
What comes next
Volume Two, Only Here: Desert Towns, follows on September 30, 2026.
About the author
Matthew Pfeifer runs Creative City Developments, where he studies how small places build reasons for people to show up. The Only Here series is the field record of that work. He also manages the Google presence for the Thomas Dambo troll in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, a town TIME named one of the World’s Greatest Places.