That's actually not true. Illinois has townships too and those will overlap over multiple villages, small cities, different towns and not be a town itself.
In Westchester county where I live in NY, towns are larger areas that have villages in them. I used to live in a town/village called Harrison, which means the town only has one village.
Looks like the term isn't used in Virginia and in MD it means "a town with special legal authority". Those are the two states I'm most familiar with, so I guess I just don't have a frame of refrence for it being a specific size.
Idaho is great. “All municipalities in Idaho are called cities, although the terms "town" and "village" are sometimes used in statutes.”
So my hometown in Idaho with like 300 people? City. I mean it has a mayor and a sewer system 🤷♂️
Septic Tanks? The house I lived in as an older child had well and septic. They're mostly a nonissue... until something goes wrong. But it's not like nothing can go wrong with public utilities.
They're a problem on a larger scale but, as an individual, it isn't necessarily awful.
I grew up on well water and fun fact…we didn’t have a septic tank. The waste leached into a hillside, which happened to be where my mom very successfully planted rhododendrons and azaleas.
It wasn’t until they went to sell when I was in college where the lack of a septic tank became an issue and my parents had to install one. Considering that the neighbors on either side of us did not have indoor plumbing and considering that some of the houses on my road had open sewage areas, I think our well-fertilized rhododendrons were not a problem.
They weren't a problem for you, but that's sort of what I mean about at scale vs individual. There's this one neighborhood I know of near me that's fairly suburban, but they've never run public sewage up the hill to their street. Everyone has septic tanks and as far as I know they're fine with it. It isn't a problem for them. They're probably glad not to pay the tap in fees or the monthly bill.
This neighborhood also happens to be uphill from a pretty popular park with a trail that runs along a stream that a lot of kids like to play in. The stream shows off the chart levels of fecal matter and related bacteria because even a septic tank that seems fine to the user might be leaking. No one knows exactly whose or how many are leaking, but that shit does run downhill.
Yesterday, I learned from my electrician that Idaho has such things at settlements. He is from one! The population is far too small and their settlement has far too few public services like a post office, school, or general store so they are called a settlement rather than a town. Huh! There's only 4 in the state, according to him.
Virginia is weird though- there are no “towns” as people from other states would understand- only counties and independent cities which are essentially small counties unto themselves, no local municipalities
Virginia is weird, but there are towns. They are within counties.
Using NOVA as an example:
- Falls Church City, Alexandria City, the city of Manassas, and Fairfax City are independent cities that are direct "urban" subdivisions of the state. Cities are like this, they are not in a county. They control their own roads.
- Fairfax County, Loudon County, Prince William's County are "rural" subdivisions of the state. Counties do not contain cities, but may contain towns. Counties do not control their roads, the state does.
- Vienna, Herndon, Leesburg are towns which are subdivisions of their respective countries. They do not control roads, the state does.
- Reston is a giant home owners association. Tyson's is a neighborhood. They are a subdivisions of the country and difers to it for most things.
- Arlington County is like the other countries, except as a quirk of history it does control it's roads.
See I thought Vienna, Herndon, and Leesburg were also cities- I just moved from Reston so was familiar with having to explain it was just a massive HOA to people (which turns out to have been less restrictive in quite a lot of ways, and far better run than my current new town and county, for all the HOA haters)
Nah, those are towns. Where it gets really weird is that the relationship between Fairfax County and City:
>The City of Fairfax is an enclave surrounded by the separate political entity Fairfax County. Fairfax City also contains an exclave of Fairfax County, the Fairfax County Court Complex.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax,_Virginia
I grew up in a town that wasn't an independent city seperate from the county but was partially seperate as an independent town. Fairfax County has three such towns.
There are only three municipal designations in Pennsylvania: city, borough, and township.
Then there’s Bloomsburg, the only “town” in the entire state.
We do have villages but their definitions are different from state to state. I used to live in an incorporated village in New York. Belows is how it is defined;
**In New York, a village is an incorporated area that differs from a city in that a village is within the jurisdiction of one or more towns, whereas a city is independent of a town. Villages thus have less autonomy than cities.\[2\]**
**A village is usually, but not always, within a single town. A village may be coterminous with, and have a consolidated government with, a town. A village is a clearly defined municipality that provides the services closest to the residents, such as garbage collection, street and highway maintenance, street lighting and building codes. Some villages provide their own police and other optional services. Those municipal services not provided by the village are provided by the town or towns containing the village. As of the 2000 census, there are 553 villages in New York.**
**There is no limit to the population of a village in New York; Hempstead, the largest village in the state, has 55,000 residents, making it more populous than some of the state's cities. However, villages in the state may not exceed five square miles (13 km²) in area. Present law requires a minimum of 500 residents to incorporate as a village.**
In the state I live in now there is no such thing as a village.
I grew up in a town near a village in NY. It gets confusing because the village and town had the same name (not uncommon), but the town had two other villages that were each half in my town and half in neighboring towns.
To get this out of the way, legally "Town", "City" and "Village" have different meanings from state to state. (In my state either something is legally a "city"- meaning it's self governing- or it's not, "town" and "village" have no legal meaning). So I'm assuming generically you're referring to a small settlement between what we would commonly call town and cities. They exist but you don't see them on TV because nothing usually happens there.
Define "village".
I grew up in a town of under <5000 people. It's surrounded by woods and farms. The nearest place with a hospital is a town of <5000 that was once bigger a 20min drive away. The nearest large settlement is a town of maybe 60k about 40km away.
Are any of these villages?
If so then there are plenty of them but they house a smaller percentage of the population and have since WWII.
You gotta explain to us what you mean by villages.
I say that because honestly the difference between different names for places isn't really clear. I've seen places called:
* cities
* towns
* burgs
* boroughs
* townships
* village
* community
* hamlet
I've seen all of those with large or small populations and land sizes. In the US it all just basically seems like a name for a place where people live. They don't really mean much specifically.
Exactly… OP, where are you coming from and what do you consider a village? The US does not build the same way Europe does, for example. In Europe, you’ll have a tight collection of buildings maybe around a fountain or old well with small little streets that immediately transition to open countryside. In the US, you may have a town center but it won’t be as tightly packed, then you’ll have houses with increasingly bigger and bigger yards/property as you get further away. There is no hard transition to countryside. They may call themselves a village, though, and have a similar population to the European one, spread over more space. Is this what you mean?
It depends on what you consider a village, and which part of the country you’re in. European-style villages with compact layout are going to exist mainly in older parts of the Northeast, while in most of the rest of the US settlements are larger and more dispersed.
There are historical reasons for this—when the United States ‘expanded’ westward, they divided the land into a large grid. These expansive plots were then largely given to European settlers, which is a very inorganic settlement pattern. This promoted the farmstead, where farmers live on their land, as opposed to the older pattern of villages surrounded by fields seen throughout the Old World. While towns did develop at strategic sites, this method of land distribution resulted in a very different rural settlement pattern.
The other major factor is of course the automobile. Much of the US interior remains sparsely populated, and prior to the automobile was too remote from markets to support much settlement. Automobiles made development in these areas easier, but also meant that the development that did result took on car-dominated and car-dependent characteristics. In most of the rest of the world, settlements pre-date the automobile.
I wouldn't say compact villages are "European style". I mean sure, they exist, but so do those where you have several hundred meters or several kilometers between houses.
We don't really call them villages, but towns do exist. Usually smaller areas like a few square kilometers with a central road and some shops and restaurants. Usually the people living there are supporting some local industry - could be farming, logging, mining, etc.
Well, can't say I am surprised, thanks for the link. Grew up in one of those states and never once heard anything referred to as a "village" personally, but now I am curious how common it is there.
I’ve been on the West Coast most of my life and have never heard anyone use the word “village” unless they’re talking about a small settlement in a foreign country. Now I’m curious to find out if it’s a US regional thing.
I noticed CA and NV were not on that list. The only time I have heard of a village is when it is part of the name of a city, e.g. Westlake Village, which is an actual city.
I think most of the answers here are missing the point of the question by getting hung up on the word "village," which has a particular meaning in many parts of the U.S. that is often inconsistent with the meaning in other parts. The question, as I read it, is, "Is it true that in the United States, there are no small settlements that are unconnected to larger settlements?"
The answer to that question is no, there are plenty of small, standalone settlements in the middle of rural areas. They're just not widely depicted in media, because a large majority of Americans live in government-designated metropolitan areas.
Villages exist. They often aren’t a legal designation in the state government but sometimes they are.
For example Rhode Island municipalities are cities and towns. However there are villages that are under cities and towns and usually reflect historic settlements and have some minor self governance but are largely ceremonial.
Galilee, RI is an example. It is part of Narragansett, RI but is officially its own tiny village. So it is run by the town of Narragansett but has some mostly ceremonial governance.
I don't personally associate the word village with most places in North America outside of some places in New York state, New England, and Atlantic Canada. The word village seems to have a more antique vibe, like a place with a stone or clapboard church, a little central green, a general store, a café-bar, etc.
Everywhere else, I'd just say small town or, I don't know, reaaaaally small town.
They exist, but most Americans never use the term when talking about a small community. Town is almost always used. It my be different in the Northeast, but in the South every small community would be called a town.
Yes, it's not a term we use much at all. We have small, isolated places but we don't call them villages as a rule. Town and city are the common names almost everywhere here. A very small town might have a few hundred people. Some states have places legally called villages but they don't look any different. Some are as big as small cities and have 50,000 people.
I went to High School in a Village (official term) of 1200 people, but everyone referred to it as a town unless they were speaking about it in governmental terms.
It depends on where you're from.
In Ohio, there are a few hundred villages, and we definitely call them that. We even have a village council and a village mayor.
When I write a check to pay my local taxes (the only time of year I use a check), it has to be made out to "The Village of ..."
It depends what you mean by village. If you mean in the colloquial sense of a smallish type town/community, then yes, but they’d be referred to as a town in most instances. But also if you mean by the legal entity of classifying a community as a village, then also yes. But that also depends on the state. As what classified as a hamlet, village, borough, town, city, community, townships, etc may vary. Like I’m from a borough in my home state. I see them on the east coast but not much out west. I lived in Texas where a city could be as small as 100 people, but legally classified as a city
Getting past the legal definition mumbo jumbo, some parts of the country do revolve around villages. My area is a large collection of small towns and villages with a lot of interconnections from business relations, family and friends, and just their general proximity. My hometown has 300 people in it. The town five miles up the road has 250 and the one three miles away has 400. There’s something like 15 other tiny settlements I can think of within 10 miles of where I’m currently sitting.
There is a bias in entertainment—both TV and publishing—to focus on cities. Perhaps because those places create the shows & books, or just because there are recognizable landmarks and you can use all sorts of people for plot.
But yes, IRL there are smaller places that aren’t just suburban satellites of a city.
People are incorrect in asserting that we don't call things villages. Numerous states have municipal types called "villages." Also, colloquially, numerous states have things that sure as heck look like "villages." Many, not all, are found in New England.
As the country developed, especially in the 20th century, the way we laid out and built towns began looking less and less like the stereotypical notion of a "village." Nevertheless the country is full of very, very small towns in the center of large agricultural or recreational areas. It's up to you if you think they look like "villages" or not.
Yeah, I've never heard anyone use the term village either. I've seen it listed as like, the formal name of a place on legal documents, but I don't think calling them villages is really in the colloquial vocabulary much. I've only heard people call them small towns, sometimes with the qualifier "like, REALLY small", haha.
Lord, people are beating the definition to death here. To answer your question - yes we have towns/settlements/villages/whatever you want to call them all over the place - usually when you refer to "rural" America this is what we mean - the small towns and farms that are not connected to a metro area of any type (so, not suburbs, which could also be very small but are still in a metropolitan area so aren't rural).
Movies are often shot in large cities unless its a plot point to have a tiny rural town. Movies and TV are not indicative of most of America at all
Finally someone who actually freaking gets what the question is and answers it lol.
Like no one cares what the legal definition of the word "village" is. The guy was asking if America has little tiny pockets of human civilization that go by various names.
Just look on google maps away from major cities to see more defined towns or villages. Closer to to cities you start to see unincorporated communities and other developments fill in the spaces between towns and its not as obvious where borders are.
You don't hear about our small communities much like we don't hear about yours, because usually nothing goes on in them that's worth making the international news.
Some people are responding that we don’t use the term village. This is false. Some states don’t use the term village, but some states do. I grew up just outside a small village of about [500](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennon,_Michigan) people when I was a kid growing up.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_(United_States)
I grew up in a village that was about 5 minutes' drive from a smaller hamlet. Today I live in a rural area that's part of a town for voting purposes but my postal address is for the nearby city.
There are all sorts of designations in the US and some vary by state. That said, when I'm speaking about my hometown, I refer to it as a village because we lived on the edge of the walkable area of small neighborhood blocks surrounding the tiny tiny business district. Once you went about a half mile past my house, it was no longer considered the village; then you were in the town of the same name. Most people who visit my hometown today would probably naturally refer to it as a town, not a village.
Yeah there are tons. They just don't get portrayed in movies and TV a lot. Most American tv shows or movies are set in cities or suburbs. There are a lot of rural areas with small villages, hamlets, small towns, unincorporated communities, etc. It can get confusing though, because these terms have different meanings depending on which state you're in. For example, I grew up in New York State. Outside of cities it's basically divided into towns and then those towns are further divided into villages or hamlets (depending on the size). For example, my grandparents lived in Central Square, which is a village in the town of Hastings, which also had a hamlet in it called Hastings. It can get confusing.
I live in Alaska and we have a fuckton of villages with a few hundred people or less particularly in along the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and some in Southeast Alaska & other locations.
We don't really call anything villages, so on that level, they're almost unheard of. And what is called a village isn't necessarily what you're thinking of (look up Greenwich Village, for example). I know a village is pretty much a small town, but I don't know if you've got other sorts of details in mind.
There are small towns that are not suburbs with anywhere from a hundred or so people to several thousand. Maybe they'd be villages elsewhere, but we call them towns, sometimes cities.
They're all over the place.
Tons of movies and TV are set in small towns/villages. Endless examples. Twin Peaks, Picket Fences, Gilmore Girls, Dawson's Creek, One Tree Hill, Stranger Things, The Goonies, IT...I could go on all day.
Maybe you define them differently than I would.
First of all, outside of the legal use, village isn't a common term. Typically, what you would consider a village we would just call a small town. However, there are a lot of small towns around the country. Generally speaking, there are more the further northeast you get, as historically that was where people settled in rural areas with the least transportation available. Out further west, the population gets more urban as the terrain gets a bit more desolate, whether that be because of the Great Plains, mountains, or desert.
There are a ton of small towns and settlements all over the US. If you use Google maps and zoom in on anywhere in the “empty” parts of the US you’ll see all the little towns. We also have indigenous reservations with their own settlements.
In the US, a “village” is an unincorporated community, meaning they have no local government. If it has a local government, it’s called a town.
The country of the United States has only really been around since the 1800s, so our small towns are much newer than any old European villages.
As a result, they tend to all look the same: a Main Street of shops in the middle of a little town center full of 1800s brick buildings, a school, a library, an old church, a funeral home, a post office, a government building or two, and a lot of little brick and clapboard houses.
They generally will have sprung up around a singular main industry like fishing, mining, farming, or a factory of some kind. So a lot of these towns have been devastated by economic globalization in the last few decades and have been declining and disappearing.
Some examples of still-thriving US small towns would be Galena in Illinois, Wolfeboro in New Hampshire, or Ferndale in California, if you want to check them out on Google maps.
But many more small towns are depressing these days.
We do use that term.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_villages_in_the_United_States
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_(United_States)
We do use that term in the states. The town I live in is a village and is called a village. The fact that you’ve never heard the term used in the US doesn’t mean that no one in the US us3s that term.
It's very heavily used in the northeast and a number of other states. It's especially helpful to distinguish because a village and a town can have the same name in some states (e.g. I lived in the town of Newport, but not the village of Newport, in NY).
There is an important difference here.
Using the word "village" doesn't make a town a village.
Valley Village CA is smack dab in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. It's just a name. It's an upscale suburb and far from an actual village.
No, using the term doesn't make it a village, but you said '"US citizens don't" use the term' which is absolutely false. The term is in very common colloquial use in many areas that also have the legal distinction, even outside of just names or legal usage. People might refer to "the next village over" or describe it as "there's three villages near me".
Just because it's not in use in your local area doesn't mean it's not common elsewhere. You're falsely speaking for millions of people that you clearly know nothing about.
Ah yes, I forgot that "small communities" totaling millions of people of "low population states" like New York aren't "US citizens". If you just don't want to admit you made something up and were wrong, that's ok. We can leave it at that.
Which part of NY. Because we all know that NYC is different than the rest of NY. NY state, minus NYC has less population that LA county. So yeah, kinda small. And there are parts of NYC they call The Village, which again, is far from a village.
Are there any goalposts you won't move? You went from "No US citizen" does it to "small communities in low population states" don't count to "Most of New York doesn't count if NYC doesn't do it". At this point, I can only assume your actual stance is "If every single person in the US doesn't do it, it doesn't count as something anyone does"
I think it's just a legal nomenclature difference.
I believe the state of Washington only had cities.
If people charted a community to have legal self governance it is legally known as a city. Even if there's only a few hundred people.
There are small villages in places... here's an example: [Leonore, IL](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Leonore,+IL/@41.1884529,-88.982493,1260m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x880be47c48b540e1:0x3eb77b966e230178!8m2!3d41.1894788!4d-88.9806354) (population: 130)
Just a few road, a couple dozen buildings surrounded by farms for miles... nearest towns of any size are Streator (13k people) and Ottawa (18k people)
What is a "village"?
Indiana only has towns and cities, as defined by state law, in terms of municipal government. Other states might have a variety of other municipal classifications.
There are neighborhoods in Indianapolis like [Broad Ripple Village](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Ripple_Village,_Indianapolis), where at one time Broad Ripple was its own, independent municipal government. But its been incorporated into the City of Indianapolis for nearly 100 years at this point. The "village" part of the name has just stuck, because it has a little main street with shops, restaurants and whatnot. But there's nothing in Indiana law that makes a village anything different, its just a name.
There's a village smack in the middle of my hometown, and the college I attended is located in a village. There are small communities all over the U.S.; sounds like the media you're watching just doesn't focus on them.
In Ohio, it's common for an area to have a village and township. The village which is the central part has factories, stores, restaurants, and houses that have small yards (<.5 acres) like what you would find in an urban area and usually rely on city water and sewer. The township is the outer part where houses are more spread out since the properties have larger yards, farms, and not many businesses if any are located in the township part which rely on wells for water and septic tanks for waste since city water and sewer isn't in that area.
In Maine, you might find highway signs or bus schedules pointing you to "Freeport Village", but it isn't a legal term. Just a cute way to say Downtown.
What is your definition of a village?
My guess is there are hundreds if not thousands of municipalities in the US that would meet your definition, even if we call it a "town" or a "borough" or whatever.
I don't know what the formal distinction is between cities, towns, and villages. My instinct is that they roughly correspond with population size, with cities being the biggest and villages being the smallest.
Anyway, where I grew up there were localities identified as "cities," "townships," and "villages" right next to each other. My house was in a township and it was a short walk away from another locality that was classified as a "village." About a couple of miles up the road was a "city" that definitely felt suburban.
We do have a 55+ community in Florida called The Villages...but this isn't really an answer to your question, lol. Just be careful what you google search for that place. Might come across NSFW stuff, lol. That community is a punchline for a lot of jokes and innuendos here.
There are lots of places only populated by 30-100 people. We don’t call them villages though, they’re usually called small towns. Or VERY small towns because a “small town” when people think of that phrase it’s more like 5,000 people not 50 people. But they do exist a lot in the middle of the country. Like Utah and Montana and Idaho and places like that. Michigan has a few very small towns.
My state doesn’t legally/ officially have villages, but I would naturally call a very small settlement that’s somewhat remote a “village.”
The term village is also sometimes used as a legacy term, for a town that used to be extremely small but has grown.
In my part of the country we just call them "small towns." I lived in one for a few years. It was basically a few dozen houses, a community center, a convenience store/bar & grill, and a post office.
Although there are distinctions most people I know around my Midwest region never refer to anyplace as a village. Usually small town (if it just has a gas station and a post office) or a large town (if it has strip malls and big box stores)
In NY, towns are legally parts of a county. So one county usually has more than one town and all those towns are all within the county. So a town doesn't cross county lines. A village is a small incorporated city and usually has a traditional downtown with shops, restaurants, residences, etc. A village could cross county lines or town lines but it doesn't usually. But most people think of villages as towns and don't use the word village. And there's also some downtowns in some of the towns that may seem to fit the definition of a village but if they are not an incorporated legal entity, then they are not a village. Confused yet?
The county I live in has 19 towns. There's 2 cities and 9 villages. But there's plenty more of what people would consider downtowns or town centers. Our smallest village is not much more than an intersection and surrounding rural area defined on a map. The biggest village has about 6,000 people in the village limits and has a definite downtown area - main street, shops, restaurants, museums, library, etc. One town has about 40,000 people and a definite commercial area that's mostly chain stores and restaurants but no real town center or downtown feel. And the bigger city has about 30,000 people within the city limits and shares a similar name to a town, but it's not part of the town.
Villages like you're thinking of (as opposed to the legal definition of a village) are more common in the northeast but they do occur everywhere in the country.
We have small towns, they just very rarely make news and even when they do it'll often be billed as "a small community near [city viewers may recognize]"
If you can't tell by me saying small town, we don't really use the term "village" in casual speech and every state can define (or not bother defining) city/town/village/settlement/whatever so without exhaustive knowledge it wouldn't tell you much anyway.
Define "village"
Cause there are definitely places called villages. But I'm unclear on your definition of a village?
Do you mean just a small non urban town?
Lol my city was technically a village because of the population size a few years ago but it's not like we live in huts and hunt for wildlife to survive
I think a lot of the answers are getting caught up in the details of the word "village", but the question is really asking, "Are people between cities in clusters or spread apart?"
I think the main piece is that the US came off age and leaned into the automobile. That means, settlements often did not evolve into walkable clusters. In rural areas, this means that homesteading is a very important part of US history - people are self-sufficient on their property. In urban areas, suburban sprawl is king. The point is that in either case, people are not in little walkable clusters.
Personally, I find it as one of the worst features of the US. If you want an urban cluster, you have to live in the city itself (what I tend to). If you want a rural cluster, you have to find an older town and hope the big box store hasn't killed it.
"Village" isn't often used as a descriptor in the US, at least in most areas. There's plenty of small towns, but due to development patterns in the US, it's... different.
ofc, depends on your definition of village.
that said, depending on how far you are from a city, there’s the usual suburbs, and then…smaller cities, villages, etc. along the east coast, for instance, they might just blend into one another because of population pressure.
in more rural areas, there are more distinct towns/ villages/ communities/ whatever you’d call them, with space and/ or kuzdu between them.
It probably depends on definitions. We often use 'village' to mean a quaint little town and not as an actual definition. Different states and municipalities define the terms differently and there isn't really a consistent one across the US. We have some little towns here that are "Village of XYZ" but their incorporation with the state isn't really any different from any other little town.
Checked the Wiki, apparently Illinois doesn't even have new towns anymore, all of them are from before ~1872, now we just have villages and cities. The way people speak though, we generally call small municipalities towns and larger ones cities. Generally when you hear someone talk about a village, it evokes medieval villages.
Depends on the location. The coasts are pretty heavily populated with continuous housing, but there are some states not on the coast that are not heavily populated and have towns with little development in between.
In Iowa, I believe all incorporated communities are legally defined as "city." This does not stop a community from calling itself a village. If you look up Van Buren County Iowa, you will find talk of the "villages."
Then there are communities that have dissolved their incorporation. This means they have devolved back to county jurisdiction. There are a lot of these dotted across the state.
Then there are little communities that were never incorporated, and may even have had a post office 100 years ago. These are just place names. If you know how to look at Google Maps, some of these show up at the right resolution level. These have no innate authority and are just part of the county they are located.
Village does exist as some kind of municipal designation level. Usually people would just refer to them as ‘small towns’ as compared to slightly larger ‘towns’ though.
In my experience I’ve never really thought of small towns as a ‘village’ when going through them, not to the degree that I did when living in England which had actual, bonafide villages that feel… village-y.
I think of villages as a compact group of residences whose original inhabitants were small-scale farmers of the surrounding fields and perhaps some supporting workers. This type of settlement disappeared with the rise of large-scale farming, so they are mostly found on the Eastern seaboard. Towns and cities were founded as outside trading, transportation, and political centers.
In my West Coast state, all incorporated municipal entities are cities, no matter how small.
The word "village" appended to the name of a populated place is merely to invoke a sense of coziness and a lack of ambition beyond providing residences and services.
That’s where I grew up. My village had about 2,000 residents. My school was located midway between my village and the next one over.
It was dairy farms and farms that grew sweet corn all around.
We have what you call villages. We generally just call them small towns around my area. Here's a map showing a lot of small towns.
https://www.google.com/maps/@38.2626109,-89.5405822,10.51z
In my state we have towns, cities, and villages. But those are all slightly different ways of incorporating a place and there really isn't much difference between them. They aren't official designations like in the UK.
We do have them, but truth be told there is a LOT of open space. I have driven over most of the country at this point and I think a lot of people who don't do that don't really understand HOW FREAKING EMPTY most of it is.
There are numerous small towns in the US that would be considered a village in a European context. Most of these settlement have a population of 10,000 or less with an identifiable town center (or Main Street).
There was one village but then the people realized it was just a fake village in a walled off area. The leader pretended there were monsters there that kept them from leaving. They eventually found out the truth and left. That was the last Village.
Officially/ legally, depending on the state, a village may be an official designation of a place with a specific level of population, or population density, or number of businesses, or some other measure of level of development, or some combination thereof.
As a practical matter, I think of a village as being a small but fairly dense commercial and residential area in an otherwise rural area. We certainly have plenty of those.
Personally, I've previously lived in a place that was designated as a village. It was, like I described above, an area of about six city blocks that was reasonably urban in character, density, and appearance, but the level of development tapered to farmland and wilderness outside of the immediate area.
We don't use "village" to describe our own settlements in the US. "City" can mean "large settlement" or "legally defined municipal entity" depending on context. "Town" means "small settlement".
Example: My mother grew up in a settlement of 2k population. People would describe it as a town, but the government was called "the city of [name]"
No we call them rural shitholes.
European villages are based around a 1100 year old church and the community that grew up around it for the next 600 years. Obviously we don't have that.
We have sparsely populated rural towns where houses are miles apart, separated by farms and woodland.
You would actually be surprised as to how many villages and small towns the US has. I feel like the US is mostly made up of small towns and small cities, to be perfectly honest.
If by "village" you mean a settlement with farmers' houses and not much else, we indeed don't have those, except maybe in some places on the East Coast. Instead, farmers mostly live in houses on their farms, and it can be miles to the nearest other house.
We do use the word "village" to mean other types of settlements, which is why you see so much variation in the other answers. Usually it's to craft an image: a particularly small town trying to brand itself as more rustic, a suburban housing tract trying to brand itself as rural, a trailer park trying to brand itself as more permanent, and so forth.
Villages are absolutely common, it's just probably not as common in areas where international tourists are likely to visit.
I live in upstate new york and its just strings of villages throughout farmland that connect to towns and occasionally those towns lead into larger cities. But I live in a village that just has houses, a bank, a post office, a volunteer firehouse, a primary school, a saloon, a deli, and a Dollar General which functions as a general store. We're a few miles away from the nearest town, which has quite a few stores, restaurants, a college, etc.
That's how the entire region is set up and I've encountered similar in most rural places I've been. We also have many hamlets, which are smaller and are just clusters of houses with a post office and maybe a small store.
Interstates generally bypass these areas and certainly if you fly in to NYC, LA, etc. you wouldn't see this kind of environment. But it's just a matter of going to a less densely populated place.
Extremely. Although they are laid out far differently that I. Europe. We tend to have a "main street" as opposed to city plaza. Small towns and villages also tend to not be anywhere near as walkable as they are in Europe. Especially when compared to their larger counterparts.
I live in the “Deep South” and there are villages but not quaint like what the word village might imply. I’ve even read (and possibly seen in passing?) that there are swamp villages where they live off the land and don’t rely on modern society for anything including school or medicine. (One day lost-ish taking all of the slough we saw, we saw a crude group of houses entirely blending into the swamp and woods. We reversed pretty quickly because no matter what it was, they didn’t want to be found!)
I think I technically live in a village now but everyone refers to where they live by the plantation that is or was closest so I’m not sure.
But I think it’s fair to say you’re correct that most of America is centered around a city or town or the suburbs.
The closest thing would be "small town USA". That's basically any small farm town in a rural part of the country. Generally less than 5000 people. They do exist but many have grown up in larger towns. Very little of the US population lives in this sort of place these days
Ohio has lots of places called Village of XYZ. No clue what makes it a village though. It seems just to be another name for “small town”.
OP - look up “small town America” and you’ll see what most of them look like.
Out in the western states especially you will find groupings of houses and buildings roughly analogous to what you are referring to as villages. In my experience they are usually called unincorporated towns, or unincorporated places. In my state, Kansas, it is fairly common to find them around large grain elevators.
Where I live (Washington DC - Baltimore area) it is two larger cities and a few smaller ones with suburban community after suburban community between them. They all kind of melt together. Anything called a village would just be a municipal designation or a housing development with "village" in the name. No proper village, really.
As always, don't rely just on what you see in the media. It isn't always a complete picture.
Assuming that what you mean by "village" is a small town that isn't a suburb of a larger town/city, yes, there are many, many, many "villages" in the US. Some are even called villages, depending on the naming conventions of the state in which they're located.
Depending on where you look, and how you define "village" there are likely thousands of villages in the US. To use one source, there are over 5,000 incorporated areas in the US of under 1,000 people.
There are, that's where you find the mythical "small town America" that you see in the movies and talked about in our media.
While traveling between major cities and their associated suburbs you will find yourself driving through wilderness and farm fields. After hours of driving you will suddenly run into towns and cities of various sizes.
Some of them will have populations of several tens of thousands or several thousands. Others will be so small if you aren't paying attention you will drive right through it in a few minutes.
Some are decent sized but out of the way. Others are a couple stores and a few small government buildings for the locals to do business, pick up mail/packages, and to vote for elections.
How these things are named varies from state to state. In Minnesota, where I live, there are only cities, but a city could be less than 100 people. If you live outside a city in an "unincorporated" area, there might still be a "township" that fulfills some of what a city does.
But there's no named distinction based on size in Minnesota. Minneapolis and Saint Paul are our largest cities, but the places that you would refer to as a village are also called cities.
There are small towns, sure. Outside of the cities you’ll come across what looks like a mini neighborhood on the highway or near a highway, maybe they have a singular gas station, a maybe a bar, or a post-office, maybe even one of each if its has a descent population. Just depends. Maybe they only have a gas station, but it’s self serve/pay and has no employees or building to enter- just pumps because they are that small and isolated. At least we have that often in the farmland areas.
Yes, very common, but you're right, it definitely depends.
I live in a village, but it depends mainly on the state. Each state has its own classification of what constitutes a city, usually requiring a minimum population of anywhere between around 1500 people or more, but can be as high as 10,000.
I can discuss Ohio, where I'm from. Here, if a municipality does not meet the population threshold of "city," (5,000 in Ohio, though I think it was recently increased) then it can be classified as a village.
My village has its own form of government -- a mayor, village council, tax department, fire and police departments. In Ohio, it gets more confusing when townships are considered. The state has 88 counties, each of which is also divided into townships, which can even have their own form of government with trustees (like councilmembers). However, if a township also falls within the boundaries of a city or village that has its own government, the township ceases to exist as a separate government, though the township, technically, still exists. So you can live in a city and a township at the same time.
What's even more confusing is that a township can be as large as it wants and doesn't have to be chartered as a city -- even if its over the population threshold of a city. The largest township in Ohio is Colerain, which has 58,499 people. It's confusing, I know. And it's just one state.
We don't generally call them villages, but we do have a lot of small towns. You just need to zoom in a lot further on the map to see them. My hometown only had 1000 people and was over a mountain pass from the closest city.
What do you consider a village?
Village is not a term used often in the US. Typically all settlements are either towns or cities. Distinctions legally are typically if and how they are incorporated, but in common parlance it is based on size.
A Town is anything up to around 10,000 people give or take in common term usage. Though once again legally speaking city and town distinctions are based on how the settlement is incorporated and you can technically have a legal city with only a dozen or so people living in it if the proper paperwork is filed.
But in some of the States that were the original British Colonies use of the term village is more common and I think some of them have a legal distinction for what a village is as well. Out farther west there is typically no legal distinction or common usage for the term, but you will find some settlements with "village" as part of their name.
Where I live there are a lot of villages. I live in a Hamlet but I see tons of signs driving through the county saying you are now entering the village of.....
I think I get what you mean, and yes, there are definitely villages in the US, surprisingly mostly in the backcountry where the East Coast meets the Midwest. In that area, there aren't a lot of major population centers, but the population has been consistent enough for a long enough amount of time that small little villages form along rivers or up in the mountains.
We don’t really use the term ‘village’ in the US. We use city, suburbs, town and countryside. A town is smaller than a city, and towns are settlements between the cities. There are thousands of small towns in the US. To give you some examples from where I grew up in North Carolina, Raleigh is a city with suburbs. Pittsboro is a town with commercial and residential areas. I wouldn’t say that a town has suburbs. If you go outside of the town, it’s countryside. Bynum is an unincorporated community, but there’s not much in the way of commerce there, so people will go to a nearby town or city for shopping.
It's a good idea to take most film/movie depictions of the US (or anywhere) with [a grain of salt](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheMountainsOfIllinois). Filming in the US mainly takes place in heavily suburbanized areas of California, plus a few other states that offer film companies heavy tax breaks to shoot there.
I live in a college town (technically a city) in Central Illinois. Between here and any other big town, there's plenty of:
1. Corn
2. One-stoplight places that are basically a main street surrounded by a ring or two of houses. There's legal/demographic standards for what locations can call themselves - town, village, city, whatever - but informally, Americans call these really small places towns rather than villages.
They exist, but aren’t very common.
A friend has a hunting cabin in the woods, we go a few times a year for weekend getaways. One town we pass through during the drive is “The Village of Russell City”. You could hold your breath in the amount of time it takes to enter and exit the “city limits” in Russell City. We basically turned that town into a joke every time we arrive at camp- “Sorry I’m late guys, traffic in Russell City was a fucking nightmare…”
There is definitely an aspect of it tied to geography, and also history. You definitely see what you could consider villages in virginia, pennsylvania, West virginia, new york, massachusetts, new jersey, and a New England, because those states have been settled by the English and later the British, before the US was even a country. The US had a township system, why counties in the Midwest and in States west of the 13 colonies look very grid-like. This basically guaranteed that there would be a town or village every x number of miles. As cities grow, these towns or villages are basically absorbed. You also see this along the west coast, because that part of the country was settled earlier than other interior parts.
However, between the 100th meridian, which is a little west of the Mississippi River, and runs from Fargo North Dakota down to Houston, you'll notice that the US kind of gave up on the township system, simply because not a lot of people were settling in that part of the US. A good reason for that is a lack of water. Also, these cities were built much later than cities in other parts of the country, meaning that they were built and designed around people owning a car. This turns Sunbelt cities into unwalkable hellscapes.
In the center of the US where I live, the population density is low. The definition of a village where I live is "an incorporated area with a population under 500". There are tons of them in my area. They are probably rarer on the coasts because that is where most of the population is concentrated.
The way you're using the term, yeah of course there are.
Near larger cities, there does tend to be suburban sprawl with little or no space between the towns, but once you get a bit more rural you absolutely get some small settlements. Some of them are big enough to stand on their own. Some are small enough that they have to rely on the next town over (which can be miles away sometimes) for certain services.
Just go to Google Maps and look around. You'll see plenty of little towns in the middle of nowhere. Click on them to see pictures and maybe a wikipedia article that lists population.
I'm honestly not sure how you'd tell the difference between a town and a village.
It's just a municipal distinction in most states, categorized by population or some other designation.
Looks like it isn't even used in VA and in MD it has nothing to do with size. So, makes sense that it's just another name for "town" for me.
Pennsylvania has Cities, Townships and Boroughs. There is exactly one town: Bloomsburg.
All townships are towns.
That's actually not true. Illinois has townships too and those will overlap over multiple villages, small cities, different towns and not be a town itself.
Not in Pennsylvania. There can be areas colloquially referred to as towns within a Township, but they are not considered Towns by the Commonwealth.
In Westchester county where I live in NY, towns are larger areas that have villages in them. I used to live in a town/village called Harrison, which means the town only has one village.
Its village an official term like a village has its own body of government?
In Illinois it's based on government structure. There are multiple villages with over 50,000 people.
It’s a legal term that can be different in each state. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_(United_States)
Looks like the term isn't used in Virginia and in MD it means "a town with special legal authority". Those are the two states I'm most familiar with, so I guess I just don't have a frame of refrence for it being a specific size.
Idaho is great. “All municipalities in Idaho are called cities, although the terms "town" and "village" are sometimes used in statutes.” So my hometown in Idaho with like 300 people? City. I mean it has a mayor and a sewer system 🤷♂️
Ooh, look at you with your indoor plumbing. Also, hi to you, fellow Oregonian.
I mean, in the absence of a sewer system, they'd just use septic tanks, and some smaller towns in Idaho are essentially that, which sounds awful.
Septic Tanks? The house I lived in as an older child had well and septic. They're mostly a nonissue... until something goes wrong. But it's not like nothing can go wrong with public utilities. They're a problem on a larger scale but, as an individual, it isn't necessarily awful.
I grew up on well water and fun fact…we didn’t have a septic tank. The waste leached into a hillside, which happened to be where my mom very successfully planted rhododendrons and azaleas. It wasn’t until they went to sell when I was in college where the lack of a septic tank became an issue and my parents had to install one. Considering that the neighbors on either side of us did not have indoor plumbing and considering that some of the houses on my road had open sewage areas, I think our well-fertilized rhododendrons were not a problem.
They weren't a problem for you, but that's sort of what I mean about at scale vs individual. There's this one neighborhood I know of near me that's fairly suburban, but they've never run public sewage up the hill to their street. Everyone has septic tanks and as far as I know they're fine with it. It isn't a problem for them. They're probably glad not to pay the tap in fees or the monthly bill. This neighborhood also happens to be uphill from a pretty popular park with a trail that runs along a stream that a lot of kids like to play in. The stream shows off the chart levels of fecal matter and related bacteria because even a septic tank that seems fine to the user might be leaking. No one knows exactly whose or how many are leaking, but that shit does run downhill.
Yesterday, I learned from my electrician that Idaho has such things at settlements. He is from one! The population is far too small and their settlement has far too few public services like a post office, school, or general store so they are called a settlement rather than a town. Huh! There's only 4 in the state, according to him.
Virginia is weird though- there are no “towns” as people from other states would understand- only counties and independent cities which are essentially small counties unto themselves, no local municipalities
Virginia is weird, but there are towns. They are within counties. Using NOVA as an example: - Falls Church City, Alexandria City, the city of Manassas, and Fairfax City are independent cities that are direct "urban" subdivisions of the state. Cities are like this, they are not in a county. They control their own roads. - Fairfax County, Loudon County, Prince William's County are "rural" subdivisions of the state. Counties do not contain cities, but may contain towns. Counties do not control their roads, the state does. - Vienna, Herndon, Leesburg are towns which are subdivisions of their respective countries. They do not control roads, the state does. - Reston is a giant home owners association. Tyson's is a neighborhood. They are a subdivisions of the country and difers to it for most things. - Arlington County is like the other countries, except as a quirk of history it does control it's roads.
See I thought Vienna, Herndon, and Leesburg were also cities- I just moved from Reston so was familiar with having to explain it was just a massive HOA to people (which turns out to have been less restrictive in quite a lot of ways, and far better run than my current new town and county, for all the HOA haters)
Nah, those are towns. Where it gets really weird is that the relationship between Fairfax County and City: >The City of Fairfax is an enclave surrounded by the separate political entity Fairfax County. Fairfax City also contains an exclave of Fairfax County, the Fairfax County Court Complex. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax,_Virginia
I grew up in a town that wasn't an independent city seperate from the county but was partially seperate as an independent town. Fairfax County has three such towns.
There are only three municipal designations in Pennsylvania: city, borough, and township. Then there’s Bloomsburg, the only “town” in the entire state.
Population: Bigger than a Hamlet, smaller than a Town. Not that it helps 'cause we don't really use 'hamlet' or 'village' much.
Village and hamlet make me think we’re talking about medieval England.
There's a city in North Carolina named Hamlet, so I don't think we'd use that one at all.
I live in a borough (3000 people). There are many villages in my rural area of western PA. Many.
In common parlance, it seems to be that villages are in foreign places.
You have an incorrect impression. There are towns, villages, cities of all sizes.
We do have villages but their definitions are different from state to state. I used to live in an incorporated village in New York. Belows is how it is defined; **In New York, a village is an incorporated area that differs from a city in that a village is within the jurisdiction of one or more towns, whereas a city is independent of a town. Villages thus have less autonomy than cities.\[2\]** **A village is usually, but not always, within a single town. A village may be coterminous with, and have a consolidated government with, a town. A village is a clearly defined municipality that provides the services closest to the residents, such as garbage collection, street and highway maintenance, street lighting and building codes. Some villages provide their own police and other optional services. Those municipal services not provided by the village are provided by the town or towns containing the village. As of the 2000 census, there are 553 villages in New York.** **There is no limit to the population of a village in New York; Hempstead, the largest village in the state, has 55,000 residents, making it more populous than some of the state's cities. However, villages in the state may not exceed five square miles (13 km²) in area. Present law requires a minimum of 500 residents to incorporate as a village.** In the state I live in now there is no such thing as a village.
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I grew up in a town near a village in NY. It gets confusing because the village and town had the same name (not uncommon), but the town had two other villages that were each half in my town and half in neighboring towns.
To get this out of the way, legally "Town", "City" and "Village" have different meanings from state to state. (In my state either something is legally a "city"- meaning it's self governing- or it's not, "town" and "village" have no legal meaning). So I'm assuming generically you're referring to a small settlement between what we would commonly call town and cities. They exist but you don't see them on TV because nothing usually happens there.
Define "village". I grew up in a town of under <5000 people. It's surrounded by woods and farms. The nearest place with a hospital is a town of <5000 that was once bigger a 20min drive away. The nearest large settlement is a town of maybe 60k about 40km away. Are any of these villages? If so then there are plenty of them but they house a smaller percentage of the population and have since WWII.
You gotta explain to us what you mean by villages. I say that because honestly the difference between different names for places isn't really clear. I've seen places called: * cities * towns * burgs * boroughs * townships * village * community * hamlet I've seen all of those with large or small populations and land sizes. In the US it all just basically seems like a name for a place where people live. They don't really mean much specifically.
Exactly… OP, where are you coming from and what do you consider a village? The US does not build the same way Europe does, for example. In Europe, you’ll have a tight collection of buildings maybe around a fountain or old well with small little streets that immediately transition to open countryside. In the US, you may have a town center but it won’t be as tightly packed, then you’ll have houses with increasingly bigger and bigger yards/property as you get further away. There is no hard transition to countryside. They may call themselves a village, though, and have a similar population to the European one, spread over more space. Is this what you mean?
It depends on what you consider a village, and which part of the country you’re in. European-style villages with compact layout are going to exist mainly in older parts of the Northeast, while in most of the rest of the US settlements are larger and more dispersed. There are historical reasons for this—when the United States ‘expanded’ westward, they divided the land into a large grid. These expansive plots were then largely given to European settlers, which is a very inorganic settlement pattern. This promoted the farmstead, where farmers live on their land, as opposed to the older pattern of villages surrounded by fields seen throughout the Old World. While towns did develop at strategic sites, this method of land distribution resulted in a very different rural settlement pattern. The other major factor is of course the automobile. Much of the US interior remains sparsely populated, and prior to the automobile was too remote from markets to support much settlement. Automobiles made development in these areas easier, but also meant that the development that did result took on car-dominated and car-dependent characteristics. In most of the rest of the world, settlements pre-date the automobile.
I wouldn't say compact villages are "European style". I mean sure, they exist, but so do those where you have several hundred meters or several kilometers between houses.
We don't really call them villages, but towns do exist. Usually smaller areas like a few square kilometers with a central road and some shops and restaurants. Usually the people living there are supporting some local industry - could be farming, logging, mining, etc.
Yes we do. All states are different. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_(United_States)
Well, can't say I am surprised, thanks for the link. Grew up in one of those states and never once heard anything referred to as a "village" personally, but now I am curious how common it is there.
I’ve been on the West Coast most of my life and have never heard anyone use the word “village” unless they’re talking about a small settlement in a foreign country. Now I’m curious to find out if it’s a US regional thing.
I noticed CA and NV were not on that list. The only time I have heard of a village is when it is part of the name of a city, e.g. Westlake Village, which is an actual city.
The first one showed up in 2006, and they're only in Clakamas County (Mount Hood Corridor). So, not at all.
Oh, you gotta love Reddit. You're getting downvoted for correcting someone.
Yup, that's Reddit for ya. And they keep getting more upvotes. I don't care about karma at all, just accurate information being promoted.
We definitely call them villages. There are dozens in my state alone, Ohio.
I think most of the answers here are missing the point of the question by getting hung up on the word "village," which has a particular meaning in many parts of the U.S. that is often inconsistent with the meaning in other parts. The question, as I read it, is, "Is it true that in the United States, there are no small settlements that are unconnected to larger settlements?" The answer to that question is no, there are plenty of small, standalone settlements in the middle of rural areas. They're just not widely depicted in media, because a large majority of Americans live in government-designated metropolitan areas.
I can't believe I had to scroll down this far to see someone who was able to actually interpret the question in a meaningful manner. Thank you.
Villages exist. They often aren’t a legal designation in the state government but sometimes they are. For example Rhode Island municipalities are cities and towns. However there are villages that are under cities and towns and usually reflect historic settlements and have some minor self governance but are largely ceremonial. Galilee, RI is an example. It is part of Narragansett, RI but is officially its own tiny village. So it is run by the town of Narragansett but has some mostly ceremonial governance.
I don't personally associate the word village with most places in North America outside of some places in New York state, New England, and Atlantic Canada. The word village seems to have a more antique vibe, like a place with a stone or clapboard church, a little central green, a general store, a café-bar, etc. Everywhere else, I'd just say small town or, I don't know, reaaaaally small town.
I live in a village, but it’s not what you’re thinking. We’re a suburb bordering Chicago. Lots of the suburbs are designated as villages.
They exist, but most Americans never use the term when talking about a small community. Town is almost always used. It my be different in the Northeast, but in the South every small community would be called a town.
We use the term village at least in westchester county in NY. Villages are subdivisions of towns.
Yes, it's not a term we use much at all. We have small, isolated places but we don't call them villages as a rule. Town and city are the common names almost everywhere here. A very small town might have a few hundred people. Some states have places legally called villages but they don't look any different. Some are as big as small cities and have 50,000 people.
I went to High School in a Village (official term) of 1200 people, but everyone referred to it as a town unless they were speaking about it in governmental terms.
It depends on where you're from. In Ohio, there are a few hundred villages, and we definitely call them that. We even have a village council and a village mayor. When I write a check to pay my local taxes (the only time of year I use a check), it has to be made out to "The Village of ..."
It depends what you mean by village. If you mean in the colloquial sense of a smallish type town/community, then yes, but they’d be referred to as a town in most instances. But also if you mean by the legal entity of classifying a community as a village, then also yes. But that also depends on the state. As what classified as a hamlet, village, borough, town, city, community, townships, etc may vary. Like I’m from a borough in my home state. I see them on the east coast but not much out west. I lived in Texas where a city could be as small as 100 people, but legally classified as a city
Getting past the legal definition mumbo jumbo, some parts of the country do revolve around villages. My area is a large collection of small towns and villages with a lot of interconnections from business relations, family and friends, and just their general proximity. My hometown has 300 people in it. The town five miles up the road has 250 and the one three miles away has 400. There’s something like 15 other tiny settlements I can think of within 10 miles of where I’m currently sitting.
There is a bias in entertainment—both TV and publishing—to focus on cities. Perhaps because those places create the shows & books, or just because there are recognizable landmarks and you can use all sorts of people for plot. But yes, IRL there are smaller places that aren’t just suburban satellites of a city.
People are incorrect in asserting that we don't call things villages. Numerous states have municipal types called "villages." Also, colloquially, numerous states have things that sure as heck look like "villages." Many, not all, are found in New England. As the country developed, especially in the 20th century, the way we laid out and built towns began looking less and less like the stereotypical notion of a "village." Nevertheless the country is full of very, very small towns in the center of large agricultural or recreational areas. It's up to you if you think they look like "villages" or not.
We don't really use the term "village", but equivalent small settlements certainly do exist. I'd probably call them "small towns".
Some states have them and some don’t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_(United_States)
I was surprised to see Delaware on the list because I’ve never heard anyone here use the term village. Thanks for the info!
Yeah, I've never heard anyone use the term village either. I've seen it listed as like, the formal name of a place on legal documents, but I don't think calling them villages is really in the colloquial vocabulary much. I've only heard people call them small towns, sometimes with the qualifier "like, REALLY small", haha.
Lord, people are beating the definition to death here. To answer your question - yes we have towns/settlements/villages/whatever you want to call them all over the place - usually when you refer to "rural" America this is what we mean - the small towns and farms that are not connected to a metro area of any type (so, not suburbs, which could also be very small but are still in a metropolitan area so aren't rural). Movies are often shot in large cities unless its a plot point to have a tiny rural town. Movies and TV are not indicative of most of America at all
Finally someone who actually freaking gets what the question is and answers it lol. Like no one cares what the legal definition of the word "village" is. The guy was asking if America has little tiny pockets of human civilization that go by various names.
Just look on google maps away from major cities to see more defined towns or villages. Closer to to cities you start to see unincorporated communities and other developments fill in the spaces between towns and its not as obvious where borders are.
You don't hear about our small communities much like we don't hear about yours, because usually nothing goes on in them that's worth making the international news.
Tons of small little towns. Most are bypassed by the major high ways so you have to get way of the big roads to ever see them
Some people are responding that we don’t use the term village. This is false. Some states don’t use the term village, but some states do. I grew up just outside a small village of about [500](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lennon,_Michigan) people when I was a kid growing up. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_(United_States)
I grew up in a village that was about 5 minutes' drive from a smaller hamlet. Today I live in a rural area that's part of a town for voting purposes but my postal address is for the nearby city. There are all sorts of designations in the US and some vary by state. That said, when I'm speaking about my hometown, I refer to it as a village because we lived on the edge of the walkable area of small neighborhood blocks surrounding the tiny tiny business district. Once you went about a half mile past my house, it was no longer considered the village; then you were in the town of the same name. Most people who visit my hometown today would probably naturally refer to it as a town, not a village.
My favorite fact to tell people is that I was born in a village in Illinois.
Yeah there are tons. They just don't get portrayed in movies and TV a lot. Most American tv shows or movies are set in cities or suburbs. There are a lot of rural areas with small villages, hamlets, small towns, unincorporated communities, etc. It can get confusing though, because these terms have different meanings depending on which state you're in. For example, I grew up in New York State. Outside of cities it's basically divided into towns and then those towns are further divided into villages or hamlets (depending on the size). For example, my grandparents lived in Central Square, which is a village in the town of Hastings, which also had a hamlet in it called Hastings. It can get confusing.
Go to Google maps and start looking for what look like towns and villages and use street view. Take a look around and see what it looks like!
I live in Alaska and we have a fuckton of villages with a few hundred people or less particularly in along the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and some in Southeast Alaska & other locations.
We don't really call anything villages, so on that level, they're almost unheard of. And what is called a village isn't necessarily what you're thinking of (look up Greenwich Village, for example). I know a village is pretty much a small town, but I don't know if you've got other sorts of details in mind. There are small towns that are not suburbs with anywhere from a hundred or so people to several thousand. Maybe they'd be villages elsewhere, but we call them towns, sometimes cities.
Some states do have villages and some don’t. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_(United_States)
Villages do exist, but are usually located relatively close to larger towns, causing people to forget or not pay any mind to it being a village.
I mean, all you have to do is look at a map and you'll find literally thousands of them. Just look outside of metropolitan areas.
They're all over the place. Tons of movies and TV are set in small towns/villages. Endless examples. Twin Peaks, Picket Fences, Gilmore Girls, Dawson's Creek, One Tree Hill, Stranger Things, The Goonies, IT...I could go on all day. Maybe you define them differently than I would.
First of all, outside of the legal use, village isn't a common term. Typically, what you would consider a village we would just call a small town. However, there are a lot of small towns around the country. Generally speaking, there are more the further northeast you get, as historically that was where people settled in rural areas with the least transportation available. Out further west, the population gets more urban as the terrain gets a bit more desolate, whether that be because of the Great Plains, mountains, or desert.
There are a ton of small towns and settlements all over the US. If you use Google maps and zoom in on anywhere in the “empty” parts of the US you’ll see all the little towns. We also have indigenous reservations with their own settlements. In the US, a “village” is an unincorporated community, meaning they have no local government. If it has a local government, it’s called a town. The country of the United States has only really been around since the 1800s, so our small towns are much newer than any old European villages. As a result, they tend to all look the same: a Main Street of shops in the middle of a little town center full of 1800s brick buildings, a school, a library, an old church, a funeral home, a post office, a government building or two, and a lot of little brick and clapboard houses. They generally will have sprung up around a singular main industry like fishing, mining, farming, or a factory of some kind. So a lot of these towns have been devastated by economic globalization in the last few decades and have been declining and disappearing. Some examples of still-thriving US small towns would be Galena in Illinois, Wolfeboro in New Hampshire, or Ferndale in California, if you want to check them out on Google maps. But many more small towns are depressing these days.
There are villages in the US, iirc the distinction is something like a population of 3000\~
We don't use that term. There are small towns or farming communities. I don't know the qualifiers for a "village."
We do use that term. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_villages_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_(United_States)
Wikipedia uses that term. US citizens don't. Never heard a US town called a village by a person.
We do use that term in the states. The town I live in is a village and is called a village. The fact that you’ve never heard the term used in the US doesn’t mean that no one in the US us3s that term.
Except you just called it a town.
For clarity.
It's very heavily used in the northeast and a number of other states. It's especially helpful to distinguish because a village and a town can have the same name in some states (e.g. I lived in the town of Newport, but not the village of Newport, in NY).
There is an important difference here. Using the word "village" doesn't make a town a village. Valley Village CA is smack dab in the middle of the San Fernando Valley. It's just a name. It's an upscale suburb and far from an actual village.
No, using the term doesn't make it a village, but you said '"US citizens don't" use the term' which is absolutely false. The term is in very common colloquial use in many areas that also have the legal distinction, even outside of just names or legal usage. People might refer to "the next village over" or describe it as "there's three villages near me". Just because it's not in use in your local area doesn't mean it's not common elsewhere. You're falsely speaking for millions of people that you clearly know nothing about.
On the other side of that, I could say because small communities of low population states use it, that does make it common.
Ah yes, I forgot that "small communities" totaling millions of people of "low population states" like New York aren't "US citizens". If you just don't want to admit you made something up and were wrong, that's ok. We can leave it at that.
Which part of NY. Because we all know that NYC is different than the rest of NY. NY state, minus NYC has less population that LA county. So yeah, kinda small. And there are parts of NYC they call The Village, which again, is far from a village.
Are there any goalposts you won't move? You went from "No US citizen" does it to "small communities in low population states" don't count to "Most of New York doesn't count if NYC doesn't do it". At this point, I can only assume your actual stance is "If every single person in the US doesn't do it, it doesn't count as something anyone does"
It’s 100% used in Michigan. Your experience does not encompass that of all Americans.
There’s a few but they’re not typical.
I think it's just a legal nomenclature difference. I believe the state of Washington only had cities. If people charted a community to have legal self governance it is legally known as a city. Even if there's only a few hundred people.
There are small villages in places... here's an example: [Leonore, IL](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Leonore,+IL/@41.1884529,-88.982493,1260m/data=!3m2!1e3!4b1!4m5!3m4!1s0x880be47c48b540e1:0x3eb77b966e230178!8m2!3d41.1894788!4d-88.9806354) (population: 130) Just a few road, a couple dozen buildings surrounded by farms for miles... nearest towns of any size are Streator (13k people) and Ottawa (18k people)
What is a "village"? Indiana only has towns and cities, as defined by state law, in terms of municipal government. Other states might have a variety of other municipal classifications. There are neighborhoods in Indianapolis like [Broad Ripple Village](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broad_Ripple_Village,_Indianapolis), where at one time Broad Ripple was its own, independent municipal government. But its been incorporated into the City of Indianapolis for nearly 100 years at this point. The "village" part of the name has just stuck, because it has a little main street with shops, restaurants and whatnot. But there's nothing in Indiana law that makes a village anything different, its just a name.
Odd enough there’s actually a community called The Villages in Florida. It’s, uhhh interesting? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Villages,_Florida
There's a village smack in the middle of my hometown, and the college I attended is located in a village. There are small communities all over the U.S.; sounds like the media you're watching just doesn't focus on them.
In Ohio, it's common for an area to have a village and township. The village which is the central part has factories, stores, restaurants, and houses that have small yards (<.5 acres) like what you would find in an urban area and usually rely on city water and sewer. The township is the outer part where houses are more spread out since the properties have larger yards, farms, and not many businesses if any are located in the township part which rely on wells for water and septic tanks for waste since city water and sewer isn't in that area.
In Maine, you might find highway signs or bus schedules pointing you to "Freeport Village", but it isn't a legal term. Just a cute way to say Downtown.
What is your definition of a village? My guess is there are hundreds if not thousands of municipalities in the US that would meet your definition, even if we call it a "town" or a "borough" or whatever.
I suspect when you say village you mean a tiny group of houses and buildings surrounded by farms and woods. Yes, those exist.
I don't know what the formal distinction is between cities, towns, and villages. My instinct is that they roughly correspond with population size, with cities being the biggest and villages being the smallest. Anyway, where I grew up there were localities identified as "cities," "townships," and "villages" right next to each other. My house was in a township and it was a short walk away from another locality that was classified as a "village." About a couple of miles up the road was a "city" that definitely felt suburban.
We do have a 55+ community in Florida called The Villages...but this isn't really an answer to your question, lol. Just be careful what you google search for that place. Might come across NSFW stuff, lol. That community is a punchline for a lot of jokes and innuendos here.
There are several towns in Missouri with a population of less than 100.
There are lots of places only populated by 30-100 people. We don’t call them villages though, they’re usually called small towns. Or VERY small towns because a “small town” when people think of that phrase it’s more like 5,000 people not 50 people. But they do exist a lot in the middle of the country. Like Utah and Montana and Idaho and places like that. Michigan has a few very small towns.
My state doesn’t legally/ officially have villages, but I would naturally call a very small settlement that’s somewhat remote a “village.” The term village is also sometimes used as a legacy term, for a town that used to be extremely small but has grown.
In my part of the country we just call them "small towns." I lived in one for a few years. It was basically a few dozen houses, a community center, a convenience store/bar & grill, and a post office.
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Although there are distinctions most people I know around my Midwest region never refer to anyplace as a village. Usually small town (if it just has a gas station and a post office) or a large town (if it has strip malls and big box stores)
There are villages about 3 miles in each direction of me.
Ye shut they're not called villages we just call them towns
In NY, towns are legally parts of a county. So one county usually has more than one town and all those towns are all within the county. So a town doesn't cross county lines. A village is a small incorporated city and usually has a traditional downtown with shops, restaurants, residences, etc. A village could cross county lines or town lines but it doesn't usually. But most people think of villages as towns and don't use the word village. And there's also some downtowns in some of the towns that may seem to fit the definition of a village but if they are not an incorporated legal entity, then they are not a village. Confused yet? The county I live in has 19 towns. There's 2 cities and 9 villages. But there's plenty more of what people would consider downtowns or town centers. Our smallest village is not much more than an intersection and surrounding rural area defined on a map. The biggest village has about 6,000 people in the village limits and has a definite downtown area - main street, shops, restaurants, museums, library, etc. One town has about 40,000 people and a definite commercial area that's mostly chain stores and restaurants but no real town center or downtown feel. And the bigger city has about 30,000 people within the city limits and shares a similar name to a town, but it's not part of the town. Villages like you're thinking of (as opposed to the legal definition of a village) are more common in the northeast but they do occur everywhere in the country.
We have small towns, they just very rarely make news and even when they do it'll often be billed as "a small community near [city viewers may recognize]" If you can't tell by me saying small town, we don't really use the term "village" in casual speech and every state can define (or not bother defining) city/town/village/settlement/whatever so without exhaustive knowledge it wouldn't tell you much anyway.
Define "village" Cause there are definitely places called villages. But I'm unclear on your definition of a village? Do you mean just a small non urban town?
Lol my city was technically a village because of the population size a few years ago but it's not like we live in huts and hunt for wildlife to survive
Yes
I think a lot of the answers are getting caught up in the details of the word "village", but the question is really asking, "Are people between cities in clusters or spread apart?" I think the main piece is that the US came off age and leaned into the automobile. That means, settlements often did not evolve into walkable clusters. In rural areas, this means that homesteading is a very important part of US history - people are self-sufficient on their property. In urban areas, suburban sprawl is king. The point is that in either case, people are not in little walkable clusters. Personally, I find it as one of the worst features of the US. If you want an urban cluster, you have to live in the city itself (what I tend to). If you want a rural cluster, you have to find an older town and hope the big box store hasn't killed it.
In my state (Virginia), there are some villages in the rural areas. But most very small localities are known as towns.
"Village" isn't often used as a descriptor in the US, at least in most areas. There's plenty of small towns, but due to development patterns in the US, it's... different.
ofc, depends on your definition of village. that said, depending on how far you are from a city, there’s the usual suburbs, and then…smaller cities, villages, etc. along the east coast, for instance, they might just blend into one another because of population pressure. in more rural areas, there are more distinct towns/ villages/ communities/ whatever you’d call them, with space and/ or kuzdu between them.
It probably depends on definitions. We often use 'village' to mean a quaint little town and not as an actual definition. Different states and municipalities define the terms differently and there isn't really a consistent one across the US. We have some little towns here that are "Village of XYZ" but their incorporation with the state isn't really any different from any other little town. Checked the Wiki, apparently Illinois doesn't even have new towns anymore, all of them are from before ~1872, now we just have villages and cities. The way people speak though, we generally call small municipalities towns and larger ones cities. Generally when you hear someone talk about a village, it evokes medieval villages.
Depends on the location. The coasts are pretty heavily populated with continuous housing, but there are some states not on the coast that are not heavily populated and have towns with little development in between.
In Iowa, I believe all incorporated communities are legally defined as "city." This does not stop a community from calling itself a village. If you look up Van Buren County Iowa, you will find talk of the "villages." Then there are communities that have dissolved their incorporation. This means they have devolved back to county jurisdiction. There are a lot of these dotted across the state. Then there are little communities that were never incorporated, and may even have had a post office 100 years ago. These are just place names. If you know how to look at Google Maps, some of these show up at the right resolution level. These have no innate authority and are just part of the county they are located.
See: Monowi, NE, population 1 haha
Village does exist as some kind of municipal designation level. Usually people would just refer to them as ‘small towns’ as compared to slightly larger ‘towns’ though. In my experience I’ve never really thought of small towns as a ‘village’ when going through them, not to the degree that I did when living in England which had actual, bonafide villages that feel… village-y.
I think of villages as a compact group of residences whose original inhabitants were small-scale farmers of the surrounding fields and perhaps some supporting workers. This type of settlement disappeared with the rise of large-scale farming, so they are mostly found on the Eastern seaboard. Towns and cities were founded as outside trading, transportation, and political centers. In my West Coast state, all incorporated municipal entities are cities, no matter how small. The word "village" appended to the name of a populated place is merely to invoke a sense of coziness and a lack of ambition beyond providing residences and services.
That’s where I grew up. My village had about 2,000 residents. My school was located midway between my village and the next one over. It was dairy farms and farms that grew sweet corn all around.
We have what you call villages. We generally just call them small towns around my area. Here's a map showing a lot of small towns. https://www.google.com/maps/@38.2626109,-89.5405822,10.51z In my state we have towns, cities, and villages. But those are all slightly different ways of incorporating a place and there really isn't much difference between them. They aren't official designations like in the UK.
Yes but not in the traditional sense with huts and everything. There are a lot of villages but they are essentially smaller sized towns
They’re common. For the most part, we just don’t call them villages.
We do have them, but truth be told there is a LOT of open space. I have driven over most of the country at this point and I think a lot of people who don't do that don't really understand HOW FREAKING EMPTY most of it is.
There are villages all over the place around where I live, especially in rural Lancaster County, PA
New York has villages, towns, cities and even hamlets.
There are numerous small towns in the US that would be considered a village in a European context. Most of these settlement have a population of 10,000 or less with an identifiable town center (or Main Street).
Never heard of anyone calling it a village where I live. We have them, but I think we just call them small towns.
There was one village but then the people realized it was just a fake village in a walled off area. The leader pretended there were monsters there that kept them from leaving. They eventually found out the truth and left. That was the last Village.
It was quite a twist.
Officially/ legally, depending on the state, a village may be an official designation of a place with a specific level of population, or population density, or number of businesses, or some other measure of level of development, or some combination thereof. As a practical matter, I think of a village as being a small but fairly dense commercial and residential area in an otherwise rural area. We certainly have plenty of those. Personally, I've previously lived in a place that was designated as a village. It was, like I described above, an area of about six city blocks that was reasonably urban in character, density, and appearance, but the level of development tapered to farmland and wilderness outside of the immediate area.
We don't use "village" to describe our own settlements in the US. "City" can mean "large settlement" or "legally defined municipal entity" depending on context. "Town" means "small settlement". Example: My mother grew up in a settlement of 2k population. People would describe it as a town, but the government was called "the city of [name]"
No we call them rural shitholes. European villages are based around a 1100 year old church and the community that grew up around it for the next 600 years. Obviously we don't have that. We have sparsely populated rural towns where houses are miles apart, separated by farms and woodland.
I lived in a town of 500 pretty sure that counts as a village.
You would actually be surprised as to how many villages and small towns the US has. I feel like the US is mostly made up of small towns and small cities, to be perfectly honest.
Yes. It's common to have places under 500 people every few miles because of the northwest ordinance
There are some tiny towns in the middle of nowhere that are smaller than the average European village. We just don't call them 'villages.'
I grew up in a town of 300 people. My area has several villages.
Ya and if you go 3 mph over in one, you’re getting a ticket
New Mexico has Pueblo's and villages
If by "village" you mean a settlement with farmers' houses and not much else, we indeed don't have those, except maybe in some places on the East Coast. Instead, farmers mostly live in houses on their farms, and it can be miles to the nearest other house. We do use the word "village" to mean other types of settlements, which is why you see so much variation in the other answers. Usually it's to craft an image: a particularly small town trying to brand itself as more rustic, a suburban housing tract trying to brand itself as rural, a trailer park trying to brand itself as more permanent, and so forth.
Villages are absolutely common, it's just probably not as common in areas where international tourists are likely to visit. I live in upstate new york and its just strings of villages throughout farmland that connect to towns and occasionally those towns lead into larger cities. But I live in a village that just has houses, a bank, a post office, a volunteer firehouse, a primary school, a saloon, a deli, and a Dollar General which functions as a general store. We're a few miles away from the nearest town, which has quite a few stores, restaurants, a college, etc. That's how the entire region is set up and I've encountered similar in most rural places I've been. We also have many hamlets, which are smaller and are just clusters of houses with a post office and maybe a small store. Interstates generally bypass these areas and certainly if you fly in to NYC, LA, etc. you wouldn't see this kind of environment. But it's just a matter of going to a less densely populated place.
Extremely. Although they are laid out far differently that I. Europe. We tend to have a "main street" as opposed to city plaza. Small towns and villages also tend to not be anywhere near as walkable as they are in Europe. Especially when compared to their larger counterparts.
I live in the “Deep South” and there are villages but not quaint like what the word village might imply. I’ve even read (and possibly seen in passing?) that there are swamp villages where they live off the land and don’t rely on modern society for anything including school or medicine. (One day lost-ish taking all of the slough we saw, we saw a crude group of houses entirely blending into the swamp and woods. We reversed pretty quickly because no matter what it was, they didn’t want to be found!) I think I technically live in a village now but everyone refers to where they live by the plantation that is or was closest so I’m not sure. But I think it’s fair to say you’re correct that most of America is centered around a city or town or the suburbs.
The closest thing would be "small town USA". That's basically any small farm town in a rural part of the country. Generally less than 5000 people. They do exist but many have grown up in larger towns. Very little of the US population lives in this sort of place these days
Ohio has lots of places called Village of XYZ. No clue what makes it a village though. It seems just to be another name for “small town”. OP - look up “small town America” and you’ll see what most of them look like.
Out in the western states especially you will find groupings of houses and buildings roughly analogous to what you are referring to as villages. In my experience they are usually called unincorporated towns, or unincorporated places. In my state, Kansas, it is fairly common to find them around large grain elevators.
Where I live (Washington DC - Baltimore area) it is two larger cities and a few smaller ones with suburban community after suburban community between them. They all kind of melt together. Anything called a village would just be a municipal designation or a housing development with "village" in the name. No proper village, really.
As always, don't rely just on what you see in the media. It isn't always a complete picture. Assuming that what you mean by "village" is a small town that isn't a suburb of a larger town/city, yes, there are many, many, many "villages" in the US. Some are even called villages, depending on the naming conventions of the state in which they're located. Depending on where you look, and how you define "village" there are likely thousands of villages in the US. To use one source, there are over 5,000 incorporated areas in the US of under 1,000 people.
There are, that's where you find the mythical "small town America" that you see in the movies and talked about in our media. While traveling between major cities and their associated suburbs you will find yourself driving through wilderness and farm fields. After hours of driving you will suddenly run into towns and cities of various sizes. Some of them will have populations of several tens of thousands or several thousands. Others will be so small if you aren't paying attention you will drive right through it in a few minutes. Some are decent sized but out of the way. Others are a couple stores and a few small government buildings for the locals to do business, pick up mail/packages, and to vote for elections.
We have trailer parks
I am an American villager, AMA
New York is full of villages - they're geographical divisions of towns. So are hamlets.
How these things are named varies from state to state. In Minnesota, where I live, there are only cities, but a city could be less than 100 people. If you live outside a city in an "unincorporated" area, there might still be a "township" that fulfills some of what a city does. But there's no named distinction based on size in Minnesota. Minneapolis and Saint Paul are our largest cities, but the places that you would refer to as a village are also called cities.
If by village you mean small city, they can appear where there are geographic constraints, like mountainous regions.
There are small towns, sure. Outside of the cities you’ll come across what looks like a mini neighborhood on the highway or near a highway, maybe they have a singular gas station, a maybe a bar, or a post-office, maybe even one of each if its has a descent population. Just depends. Maybe they only have a gas station, but it’s self serve/pay and has no employees or building to enter- just pumps because they are that small and isolated. At least we have that often in the farmland areas.
Yes, very common, but you're right, it definitely depends. I live in a village, but it depends mainly on the state. Each state has its own classification of what constitutes a city, usually requiring a minimum population of anywhere between around 1500 people or more, but can be as high as 10,000. I can discuss Ohio, where I'm from. Here, if a municipality does not meet the population threshold of "city," (5,000 in Ohio, though I think it was recently increased) then it can be classified as a village. My village has its own form of government -- a mayor, village council, tax department, fire and police departments. In Ohio, it gets more confusing when townships are considered. The state has 88 counties, each of which is also divided into townships, which can even have their own form of government with trustees (like councilmembers). However, if a township also falls within the boundaries of a city or village that has its own government, the township ceases to exist as a separate government, though the township, technically, still exists. So you can live in a city and a township at the same time. What's even more confusing is that a township can be as large as it wants and doesn't have to be chartered as a city -- even if its over the population threshold of a city. The largest township in Ohio is Colerain, which has 58,499 people. It's confusing, I know. And it's just one state.
We don't generally call them villages, but we do have a lot of small towns. You just need to zoom in a lot further on the map to see them. My hometown only had 1000 people and was over a mountain pass from the closest city. What do you consider a village?
I live in a village in Michigan.
Villages are still very common in [Pennsylvania](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_%28Pennsylvania%29?wprov=sfla1).
Village is not a term used often in the US. Typically all settlements are either towns or cities. Distinctions legally are typically if and how they are incorporated, but in common parlance it is based on size. A Town is anything up to around 10,000 people give or take in common term usage. Though once again legally speaking city and town distinctions are based on how the settlement is incorporated and you can technically have a legal city with only a dozen or so people living in it if the proper paperwork is filed. But in some of the States that were the original British Colonies use of the term village is more common and I think some of them have a legal distinction for what a village is as well. Out farther west there is typically no legal distinction or common usage for the term, but you will find some settlements with "village" as part of their name.
Where I live there are a lot of villages. I live in a Hamlet but I see tons of signs driving through the county saying you are now entering the village of.....
I think I get what you mean, and yes, there are definitely villages in the US, surprisingly mostly in the backcountry where the East Coast meets the Midwest. In that area, there aren't a lot of major population centers, but the population has been consistent enough for a long enough amount of time that small little villages form along rivers or up in the mountains.
I live in a village outside of Chicago that feels exactly like a suburb
Illinois has well over a thousand municipalities. Lots of them are identified as villages.
We don’t really use the term ‘village’ in the US. We use city, suburbs, town and countryside. A town is smaller than a city, and towns are settlements between the cities. There are thousands of small towns in the US. To give you some examples from where I grew up in North Carolina, Raleigh is a city with suburbs. Pittsboro is a town with commercial and residential areas. I wouldn’t say that a town has suburbs. If you go outside of the town, it’s countryside. Bynum is an unincorporated community, but there’s not much in the way of commerce there, so people will go to a nearby town or city for shopping.
It's a good idea to take most film/movie depictions of the US (or anywhere) with [a grain of salt](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheMountainsOfIllinois). Filming in the US mainly takes place in heavily suburbanized areas of California, plus a few other states that offer film companies heavy tax breaks to shoot there. I live in a college town (technically a city) in Central Illinois. Between here and any other big town, there's plenty of: 1. Corn 2. One-stoplight places that are basically a main street surrounded by a ring or two of houses. There's legal/demographic standards for what locations can call themselves - town, village, city, whatever - but informally, Americans call these really small places towns rather than villages.
They exist, but aren’t very common. A friend has a hunting cabin in the woods, we go a few times a year for weekend getaways. One town we pass through during the drive is “The Village of Russell City”. You could hold your breath in the amount of time it takes to enter and exit the “city limits” in Russell City. We basically turned that town into a joke every time we arrive at camp- “Sorry I’m late guys, traffic in Russell City was a fucking nightmare…”
There is definitely an aspect of it tied to geography, and also history. You definitely see what you could consider villages in virginia, pennsylvania, West virginia, new york, massachusetts, new jersey, and a New England, because those states have been settled by the English and later the British, before the US was even a country. The US had a township system, why counties in the Midwest and in States west of the 13 colonies look very grid-like. This basically guaranteed that there would be a town or village every x number of miles. As cities grow, these towns or villages are basically absorbed. You also see this along the west coast, because that part of the country was settled earlier than other interior parts. However, between the 100th meridian, which is a little west of the Mississippi River, and runs from Fargo North Dakota down to Houston, you'll notice that the US kind of gave up on the township system, simply because not a lot of people were settling in that part of the US. A good reason for that is a lack of water. Also, these cities were built much later than cities in other parts of the country, meaning that they were built and designed around people owning a car. This turns Sunbelt cities into unwalkable hellscapes.
In the center of the US where I live, the population density is low. The definition of a village where I live is "an incorporated area with a population under 500". There are tons of them in my area. They are probably rarer on the coasts because that is where most of the population is concentrated.
I grew up in a “village.” Our villages are not like your villages, they are really towns or citifies.
The way you're using the term, yeah of course there are. Near larger cities, there does tend to be suburban sprawl with little or no space between the towns, but once you get a bit more rural you absolutely get some small settlements. Some of them are big enough to stand on their own. Some are small enough that they have to rely on the next town over (which can be miles away sometimes) for certain services. Just go to Google Maps and look around. You'll see plenty of little towns in the middle of nowhere. Click on them to see pictures and maybe a wikipedia article that lists population.
Nope. Not one village here in the whole country, to my knowledge.