I live in a city of ~5,000 (It has a mayor and a city council and such), it has the highest population in the county. The county seat is ~3500, there is a city of ~600. There is a city of ~50,000 just across the river (where I work) and the metropolitan area population is ~140,000. Interestingly there is a village of ~10,000 in the area. So the definition of a city/village is a legal one based on the state.
In Wisconsin, a town is political subdivision of a county - typically rural but not always. The town of Grand Chute has a population of 22,249.
Granted “town” is used colloquially to mean a village or city, but legally it is a different entity.
Brian
Smallest city looks to be Bayfiled at 584 (now you need to be 1,000 to be a city)
I’ve lived in 3 burbs west of Chicago for most of the past 35 yrs or so. 10 yrs in the Village of Lombard, 17 yrs in the Village of Glen Ellyn, and now 9 yrs and counting in the City of Elmhurst. 7 miles from the furthest west to the furthest east - separated by the Village of Villa Park.
I think SOME deference is owed to the manner in which a community is incorporated. So, same as I try to call folk who wish they/them, I do my best to refer to my present abode as within the City of Elmhurst. Oddly enough (to me), some people seem to care. My informal default is to think of them all as towns. But I was born/raised in Chicago, so they’re all just suburbs.
New York has some of the odder definitions for towns. There are 933 towns in the state, the largest of which has a population of 793,409, which is larger than Seattle. Hempstead is on Long Island, as are the next six towns, all with more than 200,000 people. The smallest town is Red House, with a population of 27.
Just eyeballing the list, I’d say the median is somewhere around 3000. Sounds about right for the limits of a small town, though if you bumped that to 5000 I wouldn’t quibble. 10,000 is too large to be small.
Using the term colloquially, rather than as a legal definition, I like this description. I say this as someone who grew up in a quintessential small town (by the above description). It achieved the legal designation of “City” at some point in my youth, but it did not have a chain fast-food restaurant until after I had moved away as an adult.
Closest town to me has ~300 people per the census. One pretty good bar restaurant. A sort of small food store (no produce), and a sort of liquor closet (they don’t stock cases of beer, but you can buy two twelve packs). Two MJ distributers though. Ya got to have your priorities. It is the highest incorporated town in the USA. Probably highest in more ways than one.
The town I grew up near, went to school in, has 600 people*. The “big” towns, where you’d go when you went to the movies, or shopping in the big stores, had 5-8000.
Three bars (Two are still there, probably with the same decor)
Three churches (Catholic, Missouri synod Lutran, Methodist)
Two gas stations (Cities Service, DX. Now one quick gas place)
One grade school
The family grocery store is still there, surprisingly, and I can’t believe how small it is. It sure looked bigger when I was a kid!
My grandparents lived in a village that incorporated as a town when it reached ~500 people. On the other hand, my wife referred to a place near Nanjing as a small town which had half a million residents!
I grew up in a region of villages and small towns. The largest was at around 10k, has a few different pull-through fast food joints, a small hospital, only one supermarket, effectively only one main road, and restaurants of a few cultures. The smallest was officially 2k pop, had a few shops that were decentralized but no clear downtown, the elementary school had multiple grades in a single room, and it was a fair walk to go from one house to another. I’m not sure that it would qualify even as a village, really, more like a suburb of a small town with a few shops.
Once you get much bigger than 10k, you’ll be looking at multiple streets, maybe a couple of supermarkets, etc. Whether that bumps you up to “city” or not, I couldn’t say. But you’re certainly not a small town anymore.
You need to scale down expectations!
Maybe a dozen beds, nursing staff. A doctor. No surgery or specialist wards.
Anything they can’t handle gets transferred by ambulance to the nearest base hospital which could be an hour or so away, or by helicopter to the main hospitals (the scale you are likely thinking of) in the cities.
Indiana has such “sub-counties”, but they’re called townships. The town I grew up in now lies in two counties and two townships. Cities and towns can cross county lines, but townships don’t.
I spent four years living in the twin cities of Urbana/Champaign, IL that had a combined population of about 80,000, growing to 120,000 when UI students were added and had no bus system. At least in the 60s.
My wife grew up partly in a small town of about 8000 that has now fallen below 5000. In southwestern NJ.
At least around here, however, there’s almost certainly more than one church; and probably more than one restaurant/diner/pizza place/whatever. There may or may not be more than one bar.
But yeah: one high school, one library, one if any community center, one if any movie theater, probably not more than one full-service grocery and if you’re unlucky you may lose that one.
Around here there may well be more churches than bars. Even hamlets often have a church.
We’re the Burned-Over District. It hasn’t entirely burned out.
I’d be surprised if there’s a town of 1000 in New York State that has a hospital with any overnight beds at all. There might, or might not, be a clinic; outpatient only, and not open at night or even every day of the week. If you need to be admitted here, the county seat’s got a hospital with beds (though, admittedly, the county seat also qualifies as a small town by a lot of standards. It’s over 5,000, though.) Anything complicated, however, they also airlift to – not actually usually the nearest city, whose hospital is also limited in what they can manage, but to the nearest large city, close to an hour and a half drive from the county seat.
In the 70s, one of the nearby towns, pop 2000, had a hospital. It eventually closed. Cost too much I guess. Now you have to go 30-40 miles. Why has our glorious future gone backwards?
Of course, I don’t know the details of the hospital you are referring to - but it may not actually be a matter of going backwards. How many beds is a hospital in a town of 2000 going to have? Ten maybe ? ( unless you’re talking about a hospital with a much larger catchment area that is simply located in the town of 2000) Medical care was much different in the 70s and my guess is that the care that hospital was able to provide in the 70s would be considered substandard today. It’s not necessarily going backwards to have to travel 30-40 miles to get care that wasn’t available in the 70s.
I answered this question without caring about what “technically” a “small town” may be in certain municipalities, but rather what I feel I’d naturally call a “small town”, even if it’s technically a hamlet, village, township, whatever words people use. For me, I voted 10k, though more like 3-5k would feel right. 10k is on the large side of a “small town” for me, but fits best given the poll options.
Fair point. The hospital seemed large when I was a kid, but then, everything did.
And there are urgent care facilities in town, mental health centers, and even (naturally) addiction treatment facilities. So I guess care has likely increased overall. And they have access to medivac helicopters, which is nothing to sneeze at.
