American college towns represent a unique but understudied feature of the global educational landscape. With hundreds of college towns dotting the American geographical landscape, this uniqueness is particularly relevant for rural higher education. This article identifies a taxonomy of characteristics found commonly in the everyday environments of American college towns. The taxonomy, which represents a research-based model to embed higher education into the everyday cultural ecosystems of small towns where there are few, if any, place-based higher education institutions, is a result of a study encompassing 100 American college towns across 34 states. Although the study considered only the surface structures observed through first encounters in college towns, the drive-by nature of the study and its conclusions offer a unique contribution to the body of higher education research. I close with discussion and offer some implications for rural communities.