How would somebody go about creating a town?
Driving through rural North Dakota the landscape is littered with tiny, but functioning towns.
Let’s say i have 1,000 acres, and a dream to create a village.
Would i just create a corporation, plumb and hookup electric to the plot and convince people to move here?
Towns are created by state legislatures. (I’m pretty sure this is true in all 50 states.) Each state has a different set of standards for creating a town. You can certainly put up buildings and attract people to them, but that doesn’t form a town (or village or whatever the term might be in a particular state). You need to go through the political and bureaucratic process.
To form a village in New York, you need
The legislature is not directly involved, as the process is self-working under the Village Law. (A small number of villages which predate that law have direct legislative charters.)
The legislature retains ultimate authority to create and abolish municipalities as they please, but they generally stay out of it these days.
What you really need is a reason for people to live in your town. As a general rule, no one’s going to move somewhere if there are no jobs there. If there’s some natural resource to exploit, then a town will form naturally. Or if there’s a need to provide services to farmers or tourists or some such group.
The answer to the question depends on whether by “town” you mean the incorporated local government entity that has taxing and spending powers, or the collection of adjacent buildings accommodating dwelling places, plus work places and places of business serving the people who live there.
The former is going to require some bureaucratic or official process, the exact nature of which will depend on the law of the jurisdiction concerned. The latter requires a bunch of people who will decide to live in the place concerned, and who have or can assemble the resources to give effect to that decision (by buying land, erecting buildings, etc). There may also be official or bureaucratic aspects to this, in the way of compliance with planning laws and building codes.
Your location is already part of a state, and perhaps a county. You may need permission to subdivide your acerage into housing lots. Around here, I would also need to pay a tax: there is a state tax applied. In some locations, I wouldn’t be able to get permission at all: the terrain is not considered suitable for sewerage, and the idea of composting toilets is alian to most Australians.
In Missouri, you’d need at least 500 people to start a town. If you have fewer than 500, you could incorporate a village, assuming you can get 2/3 of the taxable inhabitants of the proposed village sign a petition, which gets reviewed by the county commission, and you have five residents willing to serve as a board of trustees.
Whatever the definition of a “town”, you can create a “populated place”, which is a census bureau definition of a place where multiple households live in a proximate community, regardless of the classification of the community under state law.
Whether you can start one would, though, depend on the zoning laws (if any) in the county or township you are located in. That could restrict size of building lots, residential usage of them, etc. You would also have to meet federal regulations concerning environmental impact considerations, waste water treatment, power grids. All of which would need costly studies by qualified engineers conversant with such laws.
It’s not that it can’t be done, but there are certain to be some impediments you’d have to work around.
Here is a summary by state:
The Census Bureau can designate a “place.” A “populated place” is different.
To form a [del]town[/del] populated place you just need to own the land, platt it, subdivide it, start selling lots, put in some roads, etc. (Subject to county approval for zoning, etc.) Eventually getting an official designation from the state (or territorial) folks.
This was how most towns formed in the Western US for a long time.
It doesn’t always go well.
Places, communities, or what have you are much more common than incorporated villages/towns/cities. IIRC Doña Ana County NM has two cities, two towns, and a village, but over twenty census-designated places that look an awful lot like towns, have post offices and associated addresses, but are just unincorporated county land.
The zoning rules are pretty lax. We’ve thought about what it would take to parcel up the farm.
The town of Agloe, New York has an interesting history.
It started as a copyright trap, aka a “paper town”, on maps from Esso gas stations. There was no town there. The name came from the initials of the map makers.
Years later, the name appeared on a Rand McNally map. Esso sued Rand McNally, but found out that someone had built a general store there, and had called it the Agloe General Store, since the location had been shown as Agloe on the Esso maps. Since there was now a place there that went by the name of Agloe, Esso could no longer claim it as a copyright trap, and the suit was dropped.
The store eventually went out of business, but Agloe continues to show up on some maps. If you search for Agloe New York on google maps, it will point you to where the store used to be.
So apparently, sometimes if you want to start a town, all you need to do is write the name down on a map. 
There are several census-designated places of considerable import, but have no status. One of them is Paradise, Nevada, which has no municipal status, it is just a part of Clark County. The Las Vegas Strip and airport are in Paradise, not Las Vegas. Millions of tourists who think they went to Las Vegas never set foot inside Las Vegas.
Another is Metairie, Louisiana, which looks just like a suburb of New Orleans, but its 100,000 or so residents have no status except within Jefferson Parish.
Another curiosity is Shawnee Mission, Kansas, where 400,000 people living in 16 cities and towns have been designated by the US Postal Service as having addresses in Shawnee Mission, Kansas, which exists for no other purpose than in postal addresses.