WTF is a rural town in the USA?
As a non-American, I'm very confused by this. If it's a town, it's not rural by definition. Because, you-know, it's urban.
Also, could we get a definition of town vs small town. Do you not have the concept of a village? (Village in the UK would be a settlement with a population of a couple of thousand, with usually a pub, local shop, maybe a post office and primary school if you're lucky).
The town my wife grew up in has 1 traffic light, and it's of the blinking yellow variety.
Rural town.
It doesn't have cows in it, but you can easily walk to where the cows are.
As a non-American, I’m very confused by this. If it’s a town, it’s not rural by definition. Because, you-know, it’s urban.
A rural town is a very small town or populated area within a large rural area. The US is a huge country, with very large swaths of rural areas throughout, especially west of the Mississippi. In these large rural areas are scattered small towns of various sizes (say, less than a hundred to less than a thousand or so people), with long stretches of unpopulated (or very sparsely populated) areas between them. That's why they're called rural towns--no one would call them "urban" by any stretch of the imagination. They may have the things you mentioned (a post office and bar/pub/eatery) but not much more. But even if you're technically in a town, you are still effectively rural, since you're nowhere near a significant population center with anything like hospitals/doctors, shopping, services, etc., and a car is required to reach them (no public transit and much too far to walk or bike). Look at online maps to get the idea.
As for the word "village", that's mostly used in the NE part of the country and tends to have a bit more specific definition. Elsewhere, most of us would just say "town".
(edit: I was unaware of how prevalent legal village usage is in NY, but here's my original comment)
I don't think anyone really uses the term "village" in the NE unless it already exists as the specific name of the municipality or neighborhood (or they're being cheeky). Maybe I'm too far into the metro-area suburbs, but not one village I know would classify as a village by OP's definition. I don't think Americans believe they have villages because they picture 3rd world huts, medieval towns, or eastern European towns with dirt roads.
I don't know about other states, but in upstate New York a village is a legal entity that is a defined area within a town. A town is a subdivision of a county.
In other states, I think they don't fully subdivide counties. So every person in one of those states either lives in an unincorporated part of a county, or a town/city. Those who live unincorporated are only governed by the county, while those in towns/cities are governed by both town and county.
So in New York there are no unincorporated parts of counties. Everyone lives in a town, which is part of a county. Some people may also live in villages, which are areas in towns.
Edit: for example, the village of Seneca Falls is in the town of Seneca Falls, which is in the county of Romulus.
I only know about the existence of villages in NY state because my brother lives in one and had to explain to me what constitutes a village vs. a town--I still don't really get it! - which is why I said the term may have a more specific definition. So yeah, it may not be a commonly used or understood term even in the NE. In any case, I'm sure it's used differently here than in the UK, like many things.
Most towns are not urban by any standard. I ate dinner over the weekend in a town with a population of 669. It was big enough to have its own restaurant and post office. It was a 30-40 minute drive from any town with a population over 10,000 (and that, just barely).
This is why I was confused. There's no way that's a town with so few people (from a UK perspective)
We use the word differently. In the past I think we used it more as you do, because “going to town” had the connotations of going to a big city.
“Town” in American usage can mean anything from a small urban center (like under 10k people) to an incorporated municipality that has only a post office and tons of farms around it.
Basically we don’t say “village” here. So town is the smallest word we have. But it has a big range.
Another consideration might be how far your "town" is from a more major center.
A town with a population of 1000 might not feel that rural if it's 10 miles down the road from a city of a million.
If the next closest center > 5,000pop is 250 miles away... Perhaps a different story.
I've hear it said that in Europe 100km is considered a long distance and in North America 100 years is considered a long time.
To my knowledge, US states may use different terms for municipalities, collections of homesteads, etc. as they wish because of the 10th amendment in the US Constitution, i.e. it’s not explicitly given to the fed government to prescribe the hierarchy. But I’m no expert on this subject, so I could be mistaken.
Depending on the state there may be different formal definitions based on population and incorporation status. In Ohio, we have townships, villages, and cities. In Pennsylvania they have "boroughs" instead of villages. In NY a borough is a subdivision of a city. I don't think they have the township organizational structure in Vermont. In Maine there are unincorporated territories (usually just numbered).
The role of the county government can vary significantly from state to state too.
Americans would likely use the term "small town" over "village" in most of the country.
Also the physical layout of a small town would likely be different and much more car dependent.
“Village” isn’t used anywhere in the USA as far as I know. Places with <500 people call themselves a town usually. Where I’m from in NH (close to these towns), residents call themselves townies. “Small” is kinda just used as a grammatical intensifier in all the cases I’ve heard it used. YMMV in the south or Midwest though.
Villages are quite common in the north eastern US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Village_(United_States)
The term village is used to describe certain categories of populated areas, either colloquially or legally, in 27 states.
Lots of villages in NH, although I don’t think it’s a legal term. For example, Wakefield NH residents seem to refuse to accept that they have a town. They refer to the legal township as “the villages of Wakefield”, and when asked their residency, will say “I live in the village of Union” (or Sanbornville, etc.) also, there is the village of Milton Mills in the town of Milton, and Gonic in Rochester.
There are villages in NE...I think maybe there aren't a ton, they have very small populations, and most people don't live in them, so they don't know what the difference is.
There definitely are villages throughout the USA, but I lived near some in NE specifically. They do not have their own police or much government...and are significantly smaller than a town.
All these fancy answers and I'll give you a real simple one: sidewalks and paved roads. Does it have fully paved roads and sidewalks? Urban. Does it have that and mostly houses? Suburban. Some/no sidewalks and the roads aren't all paved or is done poorly? Small town/rural. It's all about the concrete/asphalt to dirt ratio.
A lot of this is going to be subjective and depend on your personal frame of reference, as well as local laws and customs that can vary a lot around the country
In general, in normal casual conversation, most Americans are going to refer to a municipality as a "town" unless they're in a big city. Legally, that municipality might be considered a city, town, township, borough, home rule municipality, village, etc. but unless it's a big city we're probably going to refer to it as a town most of the time
There's also, in some areas, unincorporated communities that don't have an actual municipal government, but if there's a relatively dense area, we might go ahead and refer to that area as a town.
Some parts of the US do have some sort of legal definition for "village," in others it might be used informally to refer to a small "quaint" town, or part of the town.
There's also the distinction of, for example, being "in a town" vs "in town" or "downtown"
Most of us who don't live in a big city would say that we live in a town, meaning the municipality we live in. Somewhat less of us live "in town" meaning something more like the denser, more "urban" parts of town, probably resembling what you think of as a village, and "downtown" would refer to something like the area around the main street or main commercial area where you might find stores, restaurants, bars, etc.
So a "rural town" is basically any sort of town in a rural area. I'm not sure if there's any sort of a legal definition for a rural town, but in general I'd say that if a town is surrounded by woods and/or farmland and you can't trace an unbroken path of suburban sprawl from it back to a major city it's rural.
Some of those rural towns can actually be fairly big and urbanized, but they're otherwise in a rural area in their own little bubble so we'd still consider it to be a rural town.
As far as town vs "small town" that's kind of subjective.
The town I grew up in is often referred to as a small town, largely because it's physically pretty small, almost exactly 1 square mile, but that 1 mile is pretty densely populated, I think the population is around 9-10k people currently, it's just a couple miles outside of the nearest major city, and pretty well-urbanized itself, connected to several major highways, was once a big manufacturing town but is now pretty gentrified, with a solid handful of 10+ floor office buildings. People from more rural areas probably wouldn't agree that it's a "small town" but people from a bit city probably would think so, and for those of us "townies" whose families have lived here for a few generations still feel like it has a small town feel, even if the newer transplants don't all share that feeling.
The town I currently live in isn't quite rural, but it's getting there. I'm towards the edge of the suburbs now, maybe even into the exurbs. The town is physically much larger, but only has about half the population. That small, less dense population makes it still feel kind of small-towny.
Also worth noting, my town doesn't really have any sort of a "downtown" area, no real main street to go walking around or anything. We have a few businesses and stores and such roughly clustered in the same area, but it's not a cohesive thing that feels like a "town" or what you might recognize as a "village." I would normally may this, but if I said I was going "into town" for something, most people around me would probably understand that I'm going to one of our neighboring towns that are a bit more built-up
So some combination of physical size, population, population density, and a curtain je ne sais quoi are what makes a town a small town.
In geography academia, "small town" usually means a place that has a name and between 5000 and 50000 inhabitants. Though I suspect that a large part of the confusion here is that a lot of US towns are very low density and don't have anything like a center. So those towns are themselves rural in look and feel, regardless of total population.
Very detailed, and that explains a lot, thank you.
There's a few other weird situations that can come into play too, like mailing addresses, census designated places, neighborhoods, etc.
My town doesn't have its own post office, so my mail gets handled by the post office in a neighboring town, so my mailing address says that town instead of the municipality I actually live in, so more often than not if I have to give out my address that's what I'm saying.
I also live in a 'census designated place" basically an area that's officially recognized as having its own identity. It's basically just a fancy nickname for my neighborhood, so some people in this area will say that instead of the name of the municipality or the mailing address.
It's actually pretty rare for anyone to give the name of my municipality when asked for what town they live in unless we're talking about local politics.
This is considered dense for an American rural town
Aight, so, we got cities/metropolitan areas, then we have the outer edge of cities called suburbs (could also be referred to as towns), then we got further out areas, which are rural, which have a lot of agriculture and wilderness.
"Small" and "rural" are used as qualifying adjectives, and typically compound. Rural: generally far from near by cities, lots of wilderness/agriculture around. Small: not a lot of residents or amenities.
Village is not a term that is commonly used, at least not where I'm from (midwest).
Your village is our small rural town: low population density, lots of wilderness/agriculture, not a lot of buildings.
There’s villages, towns and cities.
Cities can have unlimited traffic lights, towns are limited, and villages can have one.
I moved from Orange County CA to the rust belt and there are a lot of former thriving towns around the main city I live in that have since turned to villages. It’s wild because you’ll see intersections that obviously used to have lights that now have stop signs or just nothing
I've never once heard an American use the term "village" to describe a municipality, even ironically.
It’s not rly a term that’s used but it’s the correct term as well as what it says on welcome signs. Like “welcome to the village of [name]”. Most people just use the term town/small town. I was just explaining the true difference between the three for OPs question
It's dependent on a given state's terminology. New York, for example, has villages. They're municipalities that fall within towns, but collectively offer additional services that the town does not. So I could live in the village of Pomona, in the town of Haverstraw, and I'd need to pay taxes to the village and the town separately.
The numbers are pretty funky depending on who you ask. City nerd on YouTube has a nice video on it how people view themselves as rural/urban and what city planners think of it.
You have a lot of people that identify as rural even though they live in exurbs (town adjacent to city) and a lot of people that live in remote areas identify as urban people.
I'd personally say that people that live in a urban/metro area are not rural. People who live on a farm 50km from the next population center of 1000 people is definitely rural. Everything between depends on a lot of factors like how big is the village, what is the village close to etc.
My uncle lives up in Omak
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omak,_Washington
This is a small town. We don't call them villages, we call them towns for some reason.
Technically speaking, Omak is a city actually. But pretty much everyone will call it a town around here.
This is a small town. We don't call them villages, we call them towns for some reason.
The word village implies community, and we don't do that kinda thing in the states.
We're in the Philly burbs and it's known as a Village.
It means the town doesn't have a Walmart
Damn that's actually a pretty good definition. Huh
Thanks,
After thinking about it a bit, towns with a large corporate presence, like a major grocery store etc., but no Walmart, would fall somewhere in between rural and urban. Low or no corporate presence is almost always a rural town.
Americans tend to describe locations more by density and arrangement rather than population. Kinda similar to how we refer to distances in time rather than distance. In a city you have a LOT within 5 minutes of you at any time. Within a rural town you have... maybe 5 neighbors within that same span of time walking.
Like a town population 500 or less not within a hour drive of a city.
I live in Nebraska grew up in a village of 30 people, went to school in a town of 2500. Live currently in a town of 300.
Edit - since I received some upvotes and I'm no longer at my daughter's softball game. I wanted to add when I was in school 30 some years ago, my geography teacher told us Nebraska actually didn't have towns due to population requirements that there wasn't one that actually defined a town, it's was technically city or village. Whether that's still true or not I have no idea.
NY has towns and villages. A township is way larger than a village. For example the Town of Huntington vs the incorporated Village of Lloyd Harbor within the town. We also have hamlets, like Huntington Village, which are similar but unincorporated.
However, all of this I'd consider suburban, not rural.
Sometimes the village within the town even has the same name, like Batavia and Albion
Here are some descriptions and photos of what most small towns look like: https://www.onlyinyourstate.com/trip-ideas/washington/slow-paced-towns-in-wa
A really small town is like what you're calling a village. I think most people outside the US think that rural is closer to urban areas than it usually is. It typically starts a half hour outside a major city and then can be 7-10 hours to the next major city depending on what state you're in. The upper east coast is probably closer to Europe. Rural encompasses a huge swath of the US land, and most are very isolated physically and mentally.
Here is a map showing the population densities by county: https://irjci.blogspot.com/2020/08/census-bureau-to-end-counting-efforts.html
I grew up in a village in Ohio, population around 350, which was pushing the numbers honestly. Around 1000 is a town I think.
A nearby "city" is constantly in and out of city status. They always try to bump the numbers because city status means more funding. They are around 25000 pop.
so by way of examples, going to some extremes...
Kent County, Texas is one of the most rural counties in the US. with Jayton hosting its county court house. As of the 2020 census, the entire county has less than one thousand people. The terms small town/town are somewhat nebulous, But usually in really rural places it’s someplace with a few shops and maybe a neighborhood and school and stuff.
This is a sat photo of Jayton, compliments of google maps:
Jayton has about 500 people.
Note, that the mile is about 1.25 miles/ 2 km's north to south and about the same in east west. (at least, as far the structures/housing goes.) to get an idea of what it looks like there, here's the streetview in front of the court house.
zooming out to kent county, there's like 5 towns in that entire square, note the distance marker down at the bottom being about 8 km:
now, compare that to new york city:
Note, the distance marker at the bottom being about 3 km.
zooming in to roughly the same scale as the photo on jayton.... randomly....
and here's a few courthouses in brooklyn....
Poor OP. They're leaving this thread more confused than ever.
The United States is huge and every region has different definitions and expectations of "city", "town", "suburb", "wide place in the road", etc. LOL, when I was a kid we called Tulsa, OK a "small town". Well, yeah, as opposed to Chicagoland.
You won't find anything definitive, but we don't use the word "village" except to connote... well, I can't really say. But I know one when I see it!
People will start calling their settlement a "village" here when they've decided to start being pretentious about it. Expect to find a winery there, or a studio where someone with frizzy hair makes inscrutable physical art, or a bunch of horse enthusiasts.
The use of the word definition here should be interpreted as squishy and non-strict.
In most of the world that speaks a more British English, terms like city and town have pretty specific definitions. That's just not the case in the US. Language is funny, huh?
My buddy grew up in Omaha. He describes it as being about as big as a few large suburbs.
Village usually means really upscale neighborhood. I have no idea why they're called that, but they are.
Huh. Californian here, I usually only hear people say "village" when talking about towns in poor countries. (I don't agree with this.)
Meant to add that, didn't have the words and you nailed it. Thanks!
They're still cities, but people tend to start calling them "rural" when you get a certain distance from the big cities and things spread out, often also near farmland and/or nature.
For example, this would probably count as rural.
The town by my camp is about that size, 900 souls, and that includes a great deal of surrounding area. We have a general store/gas station, restaurant, mechanic, hair place (still open?), Post Office, fire station (unmanned I think?), two churches, halfway house, tiny school of some sort and a Dollar General, two "cities" 20-miles in either direction. Most of those 900 souls are in the surrounding country.
I would think this is OP's definition of "village". There are smaller places in between those two cities, but Holt is the "big" one.
OP: We don't use the term "village" in America. "Small town" can be a confusing term as that may mean what I described, or it might mean 30,000 people in a suburb attached to a larger town. Or, it might mean any amount of people at all. 🤷🏻
That's different from anything I've seen in the UK. Every house seems to be surrounded with lawns and so spread out, and yet you still need whatever that giant building with the green roof and car park is. Presumably a shop? Why'd you need such a big building for so few people? And why are all the houses detached with no terraces? Very strange..
(All of that was rhetorical, I'm sure it makes sense if that's what you're used to. And having more room to spread out and less history to deal with)
Hyperindividualism and car culture explains it all. Americans don't trust each other (especially not their neighbors) and want to put as much distance between themselves as possible. We're also mostly NIMBYs (Not In My Backyard) and have very strict zoning laws that prevent commercial and residential buildings from coexisting in the same area. This is great for the auto industry because it means you can't do anything without driving, and they lobby the government to block any attempt to change things.
Our suburbs are liminal spaces that more closely resemble purgatory than actual communities, which is why everyone who grew up in them is at least slightly insane.
That's an American "Town."
I live in ely nv it is the most remote area in the lower 48 states. It is 4 hours from Las Vegas, 5 hours from Salt Lake City, 5.5 hours from Reno, and 4.5 hours from Boise. There are some other towns along the way to each city be ely is basically in the middle of nowhere.
This sounds great to me. What do you do for work? I'm assuming it's mostly desert down there so not farming.
I work in the mining industry I’ve been doing it for 20 years now it pays good and I live in north eastern Nevada and it’s not really desert it’s kinda mountainous with flat valleys. The towns population is about 4k I was born and raised here. The only really bad thing which I consider big is the deep conservative mindset of pretty much 95% of everyone here.
Your definition of village is the equivalent of a rural town in the US.
There are named towns in the US with populations in the single digits. This can be due to either the population moving away, fleeing, or simply dying off over time -- Centralia, PA leaps to mind -- or because it's just a cluster of a couple of houses at a crossroads that would otherwise be in the middle of nowhere. There may not necessarily be a post office or any other services there.
In fact, there are "towns" in the US in that they are named on the map and have a defined location filed with the state/county/Postal Service, but they have no inhabitants at all. In many cases this is because a planned development never actually happened.
See also: census designated places, a collection of people with no formal town incorporation/government. My dad grew up in a "town" (CDP) of about 250 residents. It's about a half hour drive from the nearest real town, for things like groceries and hospitals.
Another possibly related wrinkle here is that I an given to understand (I am by no means an expert) that there is not a single square inch of dirt anywhere within the United States that is not considered by the Postal Service to fall within the boundaries of a ZIP code. Regardless of the population level of that location (even if any), any mailbox staked into the ground anywhere will have an associated ZIP code which will inherit the name of some city/town/borough/whatever by default. This is regardless of how many miles are between that location and the city in question, or how much it makes sense.
Everywhere in the country is somewhere, even if it's the middle of nowhere, according to the post office.
For added giggles, here is one of my oft-reposted pictures, which happens to be more-or-less in the, er, "city center" of Tartown, PA which is on the MABDR route in the saddle of a random mountain in the middle of the woods near the Southern border of Pennsylvania.
Tartown is an abandoned "unincorporated community" within the ZIP code 17320, which ostensibly covers Fairfield in Adams County, PA. "Community" is a strong word. There is in fact no such place as Tartown, except there is. Information on it is sparse, and it contains no development, no remaining buildings, no utilities, no government, and no population. However it is a named point on a map that has a defined location and presumably will forevermore, as long as the records are kept. Thus it is a town.
...For a suitably small quantity of "town."
Centralia is small because the mine fire has been burning since the 50s or so. It's basically condemned.
Yes, it's an example of the "everyone fled" variety. Well, almost everyone.
In my case it was population 600, 1 paved road through it, no stop lights, 1 or 2 roadside stores, a small k-8 school, and a 2 room post office.
That's a "wide spot in the road."
"Town" is generally used to mean "something smaller than a city". I live in a town, and the population is about 30K. It's technically a township, but people don't really use that term widely. I know that doesn't really clear things up, but your real answer is "it's complicated".
I think of a rural town to be an area big enough to have a name but too small to have its own police department (so all law enforcement is done by a sheriff's office and/or state police).
Yeah, we don't really use village in the US. A town is anything with a population smaller than about 10,000ish but the exact number will vary with the density and vibe. If you can't drive across the entire population center (where it's roughly broken into blocks) within the span of Freebird by Lynyrd Skynyrd (single version not album version) then it's too big to be a town.
An American Small Town sounds a lot like your village.
But, we have like 10,000x as much space to spread out in, so we can have these villages every 10 miles or so in every direction. You could easily drive for 24 hours across the country and easily avoid all major cities.
American's rarely use the word "village" - a "town" can be anything from a few thousand people down to almost empty. It's very subjective - some places that make a proud point of calling themselves "the city of ..." are IMO small towns at best. Rural in America means surrounded by a fair amount of countryside, be it farmland or nature. I think most Americans loosely associate "urban" with closely packed tallish buildings,maybe 5-7 stories or more, and mostly wouldn't agree with you that a "town" is urban by definition. In common speech there's no clear threshold between large town and small city.
This guy has a YouTube channel of him just driving around small towns in the rural Midwest USA. https://youtube.com/@joeandnicsroadtrip
There are towns that are entirely just housing developments with no stores, no services, and no schools for miles. We are extremely spread out and even a town of a couple thousand people can have nothing nearby. These are what I've always known as "rural" towns. Farming communities and suburbs entirely cut off from the bigger cities by miles of just empty fields and farm land, in addition to places like up around Mariposa with populations of sub 100 people, cut off more by the mountainous terrain than because of how the infrastructure was built up.
A town in the USA has a population requirement of at least 5,000 people. However that can be spread out over hundreds or even thousands of square miles.
Villages do exist (I live in one) and it is generally defined as a smaller incorporated entity within a town.
So, for instance, I live in the country of the USA, in the state of New York, in the county of Allegany, in the Town of Andover, in the Village of Andover. It's like nesting dolls of government and taxes.
You’re familiar with market towns in the UK? A bit like one of those but with hours and hours of agricultural land all around it. A solitary high street in the middle of nowhere.
N.B. I’m not USian so don’t know what I’m on about…
WTF is a lorry? They look a lot like trucks to me.
It's a truck with the steering wheel on the right and no nose
How can the truck then smell the smelly road smell?
LMAO I have never completed the story mode of grand theft auto 5. Last night I was doing a mission with Trevor and he says wtf is a lorry. your comment made me chuckle
Colloquially, it just means a small municipality. A "rural town" is a small municipality that is not near a larger metro area.
Town has a specific meaning in some states. I'm from Ohio. There is no such legal meaning here. Any municipality over 5k residents is a city. Anything other than that is a village. I am from a city with a population of about 6k. Outside of the city limits is farmland. I would say I'm from a small town/rural area.
Low population, low density, lots of farm land, can count the number of houses in a mile stretch of road on your fingers. May have one small commercial area within 15 miles with a dollar general, a gas station and, if you're lucky, a grocery store. Not nearly enough businesses nearby to employ people even the measly number of people there that isn't a farmer, so they commute to neighboring towns or counties to find work in factories, possibly dozens of miles away. I basically just described where my sister lives in Tennessee.
Caveat: none of these are formal definitions. This is what I am thinking of when using or hearing these terms.
I wouldn't call it an "urban" area unless I can see a privately-owned 4+ story building with an elevator. Government buildings don't count: they might be the sole example of a 4+ story building within 50 miles. Partial elevator access (intended for handicap compliance to the lower floors) doesn't count.
"Suburban" extends from the limits of the urban area, out to where the farms or forests are larger than 100 acres. Suburban areas are primarily comprised of single family homes, but you may also find 1-3 floor apartment complexes.
"Rural" is anywhere outside of both urban and suburban areas.
A commercial or mixed commercial/residential area - that isn't large or congested enough to be considered an "urban" area on its own - would be a "town". A "rural town" would be a town not connected to a suburban or urban area: you can't get to a city without passing large farms or forests.
A town won't have its own police force. They will rely on the county sheriff's department for law enforcement activity. Once it is large enough to have its own police, it becomes a "city".
In my area, a "village" is a town populated exclusively by people with twice the median income.
Very detailed, thanks :)
Rural usually means Hillbillies.
"urban" means city, not town
How many dollar stores are required for it to be classified as a town?
One Dollar General. If you have a Family Dollar as well you are in the big city.
If you have a Dollar Tree also, you may in fact be in the 'hood.
Lol. Last Christmas my wife saw a ad for something dollar tree had on sale, the irony in That comment, like super cheat wrapping paper. I forget
I've never stepped foot in one. I went in with her, browsed it's 4 aisles and it's super discounted frozen aisles that I wouldn't even feed my dog. And said we are going and never bring me to one of these stores again.
Like the empathy I felt for the poor souls that had to work let alone shop there because it's the only thing they can find and or afford . I think I'd prefer being homeless.
I pay village taxes and town & county taxes. 😟
I've lived in 20 different cities/towns/villages across five States, and I can tell you that no one really knows how to define these things accurately, at least in common parlance.
Tappahannock VA is absolutely what I'd consider to be a rural town, but when compared to a place like Waterboro ME, it feels positively metropolitan.
I think, in general, a "rural town" is usually understood to be a relatively small, centralized area of mixed-use zoning in typically agricultural regions; a population under 10,000 with a few main streets with things like general stores, a few diners or restaurants, a grocery market, and single-family homes. These places almost always grow around farmland.
A "village" might be something more along the lines of Pleasantville NY or Cornish ME. They don't rely on agriculture and have centralized social dynamics.
There's also, wildly, a difference between "rural towns" and "small towns." Golden CO is not a rural town, even though it shares many of the characteristics of one. It's a "small town."
That being said, people from New York City will often refer to Boston as a "town" so I guess a lot of this is relative.
Lived in Sidney, NE when I was super young. Population 6,000 and ain't shit around it but corn, missile silos, I-80, and the occasional train derailment.
On paper sure they are villages, but I think a US village and one from elsewhere would likely feel drastically different. Lacking actual community (see Bowling Alone), or just look at all of the things that the village lost (shops, train station, industry etc) and what it still has(franchise dollar store, gas station etc).
It could just be coincidence, though "retirement village" is a term (also ecovillages) so maybe not. Aside from decay, I'd imagine the common perspective of blink-and-you'll-miss-it (unless you stop for gas/maybe breakfast) probably doesn't help with image either.
A small town would be a village in the UK. But because we're big tough MURICAN people we can't just call it that cuz who knows? Like you said, it would be a few thousand people living a slightly inconvenient distance from a larger urban area.
I used to live in the state of Georgia. In South Georgia there were 2 big towns. I'd go so far as to call them decently sized Cities. Albany and Valdosta. And scattered all over the place are smaller towns like Baconton for instance. Baconton would barely qualify as a small town. The biggest attraction was a small grocery store on the side of I-75.
I'd call Albany and Valdosta cities. Baconton? Never heard of it. Small town in my book.
EDIT: Just looked. Hell, you got a Dollar General and a school? Small city. :)
The dollar general is new. Wasn't there when I left.
A village would be an "unincorporated town" in the US, administered under the county. There are a few actual incorporated villages, but they are small towns that just chose to call themselves that.
The main difference is that an incorporated city/town/etc has its own municiple government ... a "village" would still be run by the county.
Holliday, mo. when I lived there the population was 300. but I only ever saw ten people. I commuted to work in Columbia.
I recently passed through Maple Creek, CA. It’s a rural “town” that as far as I could tell a schoolhouse and a firehouse.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/Rb5Tqt6Y75GHTkFJ9?g_st=com.google.maps.preview.copy
The closest city is 30mins away and even that only has a population of 1000.
This is a typical American rural town:
This is a typical American city:
^((That took less than 3 minutes to find and link))
Respectfully, there is absolutely nothing typical about New York City. There isn't a single other city in the entire country that even begins to compare to NYC's size, scale, and complexity.
A "typical" American city would be something like White Plains NY, Scottsdale AZ, or Richmond VA.
Anything with less than 50k is rural
Nobody that actually lives rural would agree with this. 50k is a big town.
As someone from rural Wisconsin, I'd say anything under 5k personally
See "nuance: lack of"
