Hooterville is a fictional agricultural community that is the setting for the American situation comedies Petticoat Junction (1963–70) and Green Acres (1965–1971), two rural-oriented television series created or produced by Paul Henning for Filmways and CBS.
Prior to the airing of Petticoat Junction, Hooterville is mentioned in an early episode in the first season of The Beverly Hillbillies, another Paul Henning sitcom.
[1] Little concrete or reliable information can be gleaned from the two shows about the place, as references in individual episodes are rife with inconsistencies, contradictions, geographic impossibilities and continuity errors.
One of Sam Drucker's quirks is that he insists on putting on his official postal worker hat and standing behind a small regulation post office grille next to the register whenever his role switches from storekeeper to postmaster.
Drucker takes great pride in his association with the Post Office Department, and he's also very pleased that his patrons must come to his store to get their mail.
[7] There is no Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in Hooterville; when new resident Oliver Douglas petitions his Congressman for it to be initiated, Drucker is shocked to learn that an obscure (and fictitious) postal regulation requires him to carry the entire route himself— by bicycle.
Joe is also the conductor of the Hooterville Volunteer Fire Department Band, which is a brass ensemble marching band that includes Charley Pratt (trumpet), Floyd Smoot (tuba), Ben Miller (French horn), Grandpa Miller (cymbals), and Sam Drucker (bass drum).
In the Green Acres episode "I Didn't Raise My Husband to be a Fireman", Oliver Douglas learns that a person has to be able to play an instrument in order to join the fire department.
Green Acres (1965–1971) is about a wealthy New York City couple, lawyer Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert) and his diamond-clad wife, Lisa (Eva Gabor), who give up their Park Avenue penthouse for a run-down farm, "The Old Haney Place".
On the series Petticoat Junction, Hooterville appears to be a fairly large town, able to support a high school and several other institutions.
When Oliver Douglas asks him how the elevation could change, Sam explains that "Hooterville is subject to sinking spells."
Oliver refers to Hooterville as being "21⁄2 inches above sea level" in the Green Acres episode "Lisa's Jam Session".
In season 2, episode 9 – "The Hooterville Image" – Mr. Haney is talking with Mr. Ziffel, Mr. Kiley, and Mr. Drucker about the suits that Oliver wears while farming.
"Back home" turns out to be the Missouri Ozarks theme park Silver Dollar City, which is treated as a real town on the show.
The link leads to one local author's explanation of why they call themselves "Hooterville," in which he states that the origin of the name pre-dates the show.)
[14] Also, characters on Green Acres visit New York City on occasion and apparently return within a day's time.
In the Petticoat Junction episode "The Valley's New Owner", it is revealed that Hooterville was in a Confederate state during the Civil War.
Missouri and Kentucky were Union states during the war, but they were claimed and for a time partially controlled by the Confederacy, which gave them stars in its battle flag.
The curtains are then pulled on the back wall of the conference room (by none other than Homer Bedloe) to reveal a map of the C&FW Railroad line.
The map shows that the C&FW system serves the northern Great Plains area of the United States, from Lake Superior in the east, into Montana and Wyoming in the west, as far south (but no farther) than Nebraska, and as far north as the Dakotas.
When the camera zooms in, the scrawl turns out to be the cut-off spur line between the towns of Hooterville and Pixley, which the map clearly registers as being in south-central North Dakota.
Hooterville is not in Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Connecticut, or Indiana, based on character comments in the third season of Green Acres.
Also, given its elevation of 1,427 feet (as seen on the sign in the railroad station), Hooterville is too low to be in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, or Wyoming, and too high to be in Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, or Rhode Island.
Numerous cities and towns are nearly 300 miles from Chicago in the states of Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Minnesota, Indiana, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Kentucky.
[17] In Season 5, episode 20, Uncle Joe talks about a time when a "hayseed" from Mason City ran off with a girl that owned a factory in Dubuque, both of which are real towns in Iowa.
However, "Springfield" is a common (and geographically ambiguous) fictional city name on television, as seen in such shows as The Simpsons, Guiding Light, and Father Knows Best.
The barn is in Pixley and much to Oliver's surprise, the rest of his farm is in Crabwell Corners, so the three towns must be of large physical areas.
In one episode of Petticoat Junction, surveyors determine that the Shady Rest Hotel was built on top of the city boundary line between Hooterville and Pixley.
There is a story that Hooterville is actually a Hollywood reinterpretation of “Porterville” in Tulare County, a farming community north of Los Angeles.
In the episode, Alan Harper tells his brother Charlie about his disastrous rainy camp night with his son Jake.