And I might be wrong, but I've always been under the impression that bedbugs were not something that mostly bedeviled rural or exurban places; rather that they were a thing more common in big cities; especially places where immigrants gathered.
My parents were raised in the rural south, and though they never had bedbugs, when we were little, at bedtime, my dad would say, “Night night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite”. Thankfully, we had no idea what a bedbug was.