From what I can see I can say that your rural areas have either small towns or separate farms. Feel free to prove me wrong with examples.

45 comments

  1. There are many villages in Alaska such as, Point Hope, Kivalina, Wainwright. But I am not so sure about continental US

  3. The US doesn’t generally have any official definition of village vs. town or town vs. city the way you find in Britain. It’s all about self identification and marketing

  4. We have villages, unincorporated areas, townships, all sorts of names for a cluster of people living nearby not near any other clusters of people.

  5. If by village you mean a Shell station and a Walmart surrounded by forty fast food joints and corn then yes, there are plenty.

  7. Edit: Why the hell are you all downvoting OP’s legit answer to me below?

    I’ll just post this:

    [US Definition of “Village”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_(United_States))

    Whereas European countries are highly likely to have a very specific LEGAL definition of what a “Village” is, does not mean that this definition is shared abroad, especially when the legal definition of a village as an administrative unit is subject to the laws each and every one of our states and territories and not the Federal Goverment.

    I’m guessing you’re Polish OP. Europeans love to remind us that our country is very young, so with that said we did not have most of the millenium for villages to develop in a way that remotely resembles anything in Europe with the exception of whatever was built before the Industrial Revolution, which was not much to begin with and hardly any of that remains. Many of your villages and towns have identities that can be traced well into the 12th or 11th centuries, we obviously do not.

    Alaska has 229 *federally recognized* villages, they are Americans, but as Native Alaskans have a unique history and culture that goes back to time immemorial. These villages have nothing in common with the “Village” of Friendship Heights, Maryland which looks like your typical concrete utilitarian hell. The average “Village” in my homestate of Virginia looks like a typical American suburb. We could go on all day like this and easily list many hundreds of Villages per the definition of the respective states and territories yet completely fail to match whatever definition you’re going by OP.

  8. We don’t have a specific definition for a village and usage of the term varies by state. The federal government cannot legislate on local government so states are free to divide themselves as they see fit and to call those divisions whatever the see fit. Do we have things that you yourself might recognize as a village? Probably some and some may even have village in the name, or they might not, and they may or may not be legally defined as a village by the state they are in and that definition may or may not fit what you understand a village to be.

  11. I can speak for New York State.

    The state is subdivided into counties, which are then subdivided into townships (or simply towns) and cities/villages. Then the smallest groupings of homes are hamlets and this may be what you are thinking about.

    Hamlets are typically clusters of farm houses centered around a crossroads with maybe a small store, church, or community hall. They have no political organization and rely on the town and county for services.

    If a hamlet grows large enough it can vote to “incorporate” as a city/village. As far as I know there is no legal definition for either term. As a city/village the residents pay extra taxes to pay for local police, fire department, emergency services, roads, water, and/or sewer. Schools are located in the city/village but take students from the surrounding towns.

    The rural areas outside the city/village are the towns. These have their own government whose focus is typically on road maintenance and a justice of the peace who judges minor violations or refers crimes to a county court. Residents of a town (including hamlets) are typically on their own for water and sewer (typically well and septic) and the county for police, fire, and emergency services. Though if the response time is too long due to distance the town might contract with a closer city/village or run their own using volunteers (there are no volunteer police). The town also maintains farm roads. These are roads to rural homes but aren’t connecting hamlets or cities/villages.

    The county as a whole has its own government too. It maintains the “intercity” roads, but typically roads between cities/villages are maintained by the state and the county maintains those between hamlets. On top of that the county handles waste disposal (dump, recycling center, incinerator), the courthouse, and jail.

    Hope this helps.

  13. Yes. I’m from rural upstate NY and there’s countless villages there. I won’t dox myself with examples.

  14. Again when looking at the United States it is best to remember that power not reserved for the federal government in the Constitution is yielded to the states. So while the Constitution determines what and how a state is admitted, how that state is internally organized is up to that state.

    The answer will vary on the state, as different states have different local government organizations and nomenclature for incorporated and unincorporated communitties.

    For example in my home state of [Pennsylvania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_government_in_Pennsylvania) (pop. 13 million)

    >There are six types of local governments listed in the Pennsylvania Constitution: county, township, borough, town, city, and school district.

    Of those there is only one town in the state ( for historic reasons)- everything else that would be considered a town is borough.

    Villages are unincorporated, smaller communities relying on services of the township. My home”town” is considered a village. In fact, my home township only has villages.

    In [Texas](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_Texas#Local_government) (pop. 30 million) where I live now, they do not have townships, and the only incorporated designation for a community is city. There are some other non-community designations like school districts and groundwater conservation districts which are governed separate from other local government and are their own taxing entities.

  15. Village doesn’t have any meaning here.

    It could mean and administered area or an unincorporated one. It could mean 10k prople or 5.

    This doesnt even get into the fact of states being different. PA has boroughs for instance that refer to self administered municipalities. But in New York it typically only refers to a city subdivision.

    In PA its entirely possible though unlikely what qualifies as a European village is actually a borough or would be a township somewhere else or a county somewhwre else.

    So what exactly do you define village as?

  17. I grew up on a farm in the Midwest, but my elementary school was in a place actually designated as a village that has around 300 people. There is a locally-owned bank, a cafe, a bar, two churches, a couple of other small businesses (although fewer than during my childhood) and the biggest employers in the town are agriculture-related in some way (like the grain elevator).

    My high school was in a town of under 3000 with a scaled-up number of businesses and whatnot, but still largely there to support the surrounding farms.

    The school district also included another town of around 500. That’s the same story. Several other nearby towns between 200 and 300 were between where I lived and the nearest town in any direction larger than the one with my high school in it. Some places are even smaller, with under 50 people and are really just a grain elevator with several houses clustered around it.

    They might not have as much history as European villages, but “very small farming communities” are a thing.

  18. There are lots of “villages” where I live on Long Island. It’s really just about the local government. A village in a larger geographic entity incorporates and then has its own board and, in my town, police force.

  19. Farm communities exist in the US. Valle Crucis, North Carolina is an example of this type of unincorporated rural community.

  21. Yes, there’s many but they’re usually a sort of a smaller town that has been incorporated into a larger municipality. A good example is Hartford, VT. It is technically a town that is composed of a couple villages.

    The term village can also be used to describe a small sort of downtown area in a rural community where you’ll usually find the post office, town offices and a few businesses.

  22. Just off the top of my head, Pascoag, Lippit, Oaklawn, and Knightsville are villages, though Oaklawn and Knightsville have been incorporated into Cranston. I believe the town of New Shoreham can be understood to be a village.

  23. Sure. “A village is a general purpose municipal corporation formed voluntarily by the residents of an area in one or more towns to provide themselves with municipal services.”

    My county contains one city, 19 towns, and 15 villages.

  24. Yes but just informally/historically here. I live a mile outside of a village here in the Pennsylvania mountains. There’s about 60 houses a diner, a pizzeria, a church, a garage, the volunteer fire company, a post office, a bar, a gas station, a day care, a medical building, farm meat market and of course, a Dollar General store.

    The state department of transportation puts up white and blue signs saying “Village of . . . .” but that’s as far as recognition goes unless it’s big enough to have its own zip code and post office.

    Even so “villages” here hav no legal political standing. It’s just part of my more rural township which in turn make up a county, 67 of which comprise Pennsylvania.

    However, if you go to New York State, they do have actual legal villages that perform municipal services afaik.

  27. Depends on the state. Pennsylvania has three categories for incorporated political divisions, based on population, for example.

    City – 10k and up
    Borough – 5k to 10k
    Village – 5k and below

  29. In Northern California, the word “village” usually doesn’t have a legal definition unless it was a pre-planned space owned by a private corporation as a marketing tool. We opt to say “town” or “community” as a result. Of all my years here, I haven’t seen or been to a Village in the State, and I am approaching 4 decades of life.

    I’ve been to some pretty isolated communities too from Washington, California to Doyle, California, down the list, many of which are towns or unincorporated communities.

    *Edit: Nevada doesn’t have them either, as far as I am aware.*

    *Edit 2: We also don’t have ‘Provinces’ and I forget the European word for it that is sometimes considered like a ‘Bioregion’ but it is a very foreign concept that we attempt to equate to a ‘County.’ We fall short because Counties ‘span’ bioregions over here. E.g., Placer County goes from Sub-Arctic to Mediterranean Climate Zones. We grow lichen and oranges!*

  31. What is your definition of village? Are you going by population, layout, building style? My mom grew up in a “village” in rural Canada because the population was low enough to be considered one (only maybe 100 people lived there). You might find similar communities here in the US but without knowing your definition of village its going to be hard to find examples

  32. There are tons of farm focused rural settlements in Wisconsin. Clinton, Butternut, Browntown, Bagley. I don’t know if all of them would fit the criteria of a village but they’re all small and rural.

  33. I don’t know that anyone is familiar with the specific criteria that you might be thinking of to delineate what’s a “town” and what’s a “village” and any differences in government there may be between them.

    But yes there are plenty of quite small places people live — sometimes only 10-20 people, sometimes 200, etc.

  34. In Georgia you are legally either a city or nothing. If you are a city, you are legally incorporated (formed into a legally recognized body) with a charter of some kind from the state. If not, you are unincorporated and administered by the county government.

    I read somewhere that the smallest incorporated city in Georgia has something like 22 people. It has all the same rights as a city of 500,000 because a city is a city.

  36. At one point, most of the cities in the southwest could have matched what I imagine to be your definition of a village, but things started to change once the Second Industrial Revolution started cranking. Everything changed once the railroad hit Texas

  37. Ever considered just researching that yourself? Why do people ask questions on Reddit that is answered instantly by Google?

  39. In New England, which is fairly densely populated, there’s a few places that can be villages. Most of the dense developments are in the river valleys and harbors, so there’s actually a lot of emptier space. The map is covered in names, but plenty of those are either smaller sections of a town or towns with small populations and no amenities

    Cape Cod and southeastern Massachusetts, for example, is made up of relatively large towns that are themselves made up of smaller villages, some of which confusingly include parts of different towns. Ita a holdover from Colonial times, large tracts of lands but limited travel between them.

    These villages are functionally postal codes but are also usually fairly self contained, with its own walkable center, stores, churches, police and fire, etc, but most don’t have everything one would need.

    These village identities have probably been leaned into by the tourism industry, but also reflect the complicated geography. This continues today because traffic is so bad that you’re better off just staying in your own village most nof the time.

    While they aren’t always called villages, the hill towns of New England and coastal town of Maine are closer to the description of a village as a small urban center surrounded by rural space. Some of these towns had higher populations in the 1800s, so have an outsized town center for their small size. So while we still call them towns, they are pretty sparsely populated and don’t have any stores.

  40. So the premise is, you have come to a conclusion about all of American society concerning 330,000,000 people across 9,147,420 square kilometers of land and how we group up in cities and towns and we have to prove YOU wrong. I won’t waste another second and your arrogant ignorance.

  41. I find it odd that the term village isn’t used more in the US. I live in a small community of 200. It’s not only surrounded by farm land, there’s also large plots that are used to grow crops in town. They just harvested soy beans in the area and everything has a fine dusting of dirt and some sort of soy bean chaff. It’s a good 10 miles/16 km to the nearest town with a grocery store, but there’s town of 5000 with a Dollar General that’s 8 miles/13 km away. Here in the “village” we have two gas station/convenience stores, a post office and a “city” hall. We used to have a couple different diners at one point or another and two churches, but all have closed up in the 25 years I have lived here. I would consider my town a village, but due to how it’s worded in Missouri law, it’s incorporated as a city.

    I think the difference here is legal language vs use of language.

  42. We’re getting bogged down with semantics. The legal definifion of a village is different in the US than in the EU so you’ll need to say what your definition of a village is.

    What’s the population size, how far removed from a larger city, what does it not include? What kind of features in the town must be present?

    If you’re saying a village cannot include commercial developments like a Dollar General, a gas station, or a McDonald’s, there won’t be many because property rights in the US give owners a lot of freedom to put what they want on their lots (under certain heights and in certain areas). There will be some localities that block those kinds of things, but they’re a bit more rare. Local communities get pressure to provide economic opportunity so if a town is struggling, it’s hard to rally your whole town to say no to new development when it *may* provide jobs or services.

    But if you’re saying 500 or 5,000 people or fewer, with a church and a city hall, we’ve got thousands of them.

    I don’t live there anymore, but some places I know in my home region of Illinois/Iowa/Wisconsin (a pretty random spot in the US), I can list a few quaint, cute towns off the top of my head, and these are just *prettier* ones (just zoom into farm country and you’ll find thousands of tiny communities without much more than a bar and a post office):

    – Swisher, IA

    – Bishop Hill, IL

    – Amana, IA

    Slightly larger, still quaint, will include commercial:

    – Geneseo, IL

    – Galena, IL

    – Le Claire, IA

    – New Glarus, WI

    Edit: I suspect you’re probably talking about architecture and urban design, and that’s where it’ll be more difficult to find. Much of the US was bulldozed for the car or built after the car. Also, much of the US even pre-car was built with extra space because it’s one thing we had a lot of during the early days.

    If you’re trying to find less than 500 people with narrow streets, multiple storied buildings, cobblestone, and old buildings, those *will* be hard to find. You’re better off looking on the east coast where there’s very old development.

    You can find downtowns with traditional architecture, brick, and cobblestone, or many towns that have vestiges of a few of these things, but they won’t be compact with tight streets. They’ll still be pretty spread out by Euro standards.

    This is an ongoing, hot topic in the US that you’ve stumbled into. For a bit more on the issue (and a town that might fit your standard) check out this video on [Brattleboro, VT, by Strong Towns](https://youtu.be/q7T9u53Im9E?si=e8rEE9wxt3_tpz6V).

  43. Villages??? What is this lord of the rings?? Hey Frodo you looking for pit stops on your way to Mordor??

  44. Texas is full of them, but based on your other replies in this thread, I suspect that none of them will meet your very specific and largely unknowable criteria, which appears to be “a place that is nearly identical to a European one”.

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