I grew up in rural America (town of 2000, about half the students were on farms), and my mom taught in another small town. She told me this summer that her old district had three applicants to an open position. By the time they did interviews, two of them had already accepted positions elsewhere. My high school class graduated 63, including three hispanic students. I believe they were the first non-whites to graduate from my school. This was 1999.
Wow, there were 2900 people in my high school. My graduating class was 900-something. Your town was smaller than my high school. I had no clue about rural America until I got some first hand experience with it in the early 90's as I sort of wandered around a bit. Moving from one of the more densely populated areas in the country to Kentucky was... a bit of a shock. There are more people in LA county than in Kentucky and Indiana combined.