Grantville is based on the real town of Mannington, WV. The overlap is extraordinarily close, but Grantville is still fictional. There are differences. But it’s so close, we can actually list most of them, at least for the year 1631/2000. The farther we get from that year, the more things diverge.
Downtown
Arguably the biggest single difference on the day the Ring of Fire happens is that the downtown of Grantville closely resembles downtown Mannington in 1990, not 2000. This is primarily because the novel 1632 specifies several multi-story buildings that simply weren’t there in 2000, but when we looked at older pictures of Market Street, they were. In particular, fire had reduced a large, multi-story building at the corner of Market and Water Streets to a tiny single story building in real life. In Grantville, that didn’t happen. While the building undoubtedly needed some work, it was still sound at the Ring of Fire.
The apartment buildings across Water Street from the Mannington post office represent another change. The condition down-time wasn’t specified, but it was either already a long-term hotel or quickly became one (the Willard). It did not have trees growing out through any of the windows, nor were they close to it. The comparatively small (but also three story) building next to it, which became a park in real life, was still there in 2000. The real world condition was exceedingly poor. Realistically, it was probably unsafe to enter. The condition in canon is undetermined as the building hasn’t had a single reference to date.
Following that trend, the Tetrick Building at Buffalo Street and Pyles Avenue was sound enough for both floors to be in use within a few months.
Churches
Mannington and the Ring of Fire area has a lot of churches. There aren’t nearly as many in Grantville. Some of the buildings are there but have been turned into homes, businesses, or something else (like daycare), but there just weren’t as many churches in Grantville on the day of the Ring of Fire as there were in Mannington that same day.
Guns
Eric was on record as saying he knew full well that an average of five guns per adult was way too low but it was the most he thought many of his readers would believe. So, we know. Grantville has a lot less up-time guns than Mannington.
Senior Living
It’s not quite clear what happened to cause this to deviate so wildly from real life, but there weren’t any senior care residences within the real world Ring of Fire area. The Senior Center that is clearly an activity center, not a residence, but it’s a nice one with a lovely pavilion outside. As a result, we’ve simply selected locations for the three senior and extended care residences.
The Bowers is located next to the Senior Center in what is a park in Mannington. The Pritchard has a tentative location west of the Fair venue.
The Bowers Mansion
The contents of the mansion did not, by and large, come through the Ring of Fire. Unfortunately, they were not known to the authors (Eric Flint and David Weber) when they wrote the first books in the series. Because those things would have changed how the stories unfolded, the decision was made that those items did not come through. The mansion wasn’t fully empty so some things came through, but not most of what was auctioned off in the early 2000s. If you want to have something from the Bowers Mansion come through the Ring of Fire, you should get editorial approval before writing it into your story.