If any, that is.
- Rick
Township appears to be a more specific term than town, although it looks like in some places in the Northeastern US, the terms define different types of small “units of local government.”
Hope this helps.
Meant to add:
Though FWIW, I think most places use the terms as synonyms.
In Oklahoma, a township is used in the legal description of real property outside of an incorporated city. A township is 36 sqare miles (or 6 miles by 6 miles).
A town is a political unit in Wisconsin. It denotes any area outside an incoporated city or village. A township is unit of land measurement, a square 6 miles by 6 miles. Often, though, people call ‘towns’ ‘townships’, eventhough this is not correct.
I believe in NJ a township is a reference to the type of government in place. A town is just a generic term for a small urban area.
I think the term describes the same thing, but varies by state. As someone once corrected me, NY State has towns, while NJ has townships.
I’m still stuck on what “incorporated” means in this context.
I’d like to think that if a place is not incorporated, then it has no legal standing, and is no more than a large neighborhood. But I know that’s wrong. There are lots of unincorporated places that have their own mayors, police force, garbage pickup, etc.
Can someone offer me a clue?
In Iowa a township is a designation on the great rectangular survey as a six mile square a certain distance from established lines of latitude and longitude. For instance, my home is in township 94 North, Range 8 West of the 5th Prime Meridian. In other words, I live in a six mile square whose Southwest corner is 564 miles north of the Missouri-Arkansas border and 48 miles west of a north-south line that runs (I think) through LaCrosse, Wisconsin.
It is also a political subdivision with an elected board of trustees. The trustees’ power extends to resolving disputes about stray livestock and fences.
Incorporated town and cities exist by virtue of “incorporation.” Incorporation is done by having the residents of a geographic area go through a series of statutorily mandated procedures that includes a survey and an election or referendum and filing with the State secretary of state. Here we have had several dying rural town “unincorporated” in the last few years and there is an effort ongoing to incorporate at least one new town. It may well be that this is all different in parts of the country that were settled before the late 18th century or under the medieval British system.
I have a recollection from studying about the Doomsday Book in 6th grade that at the time of the Norman Conquest a township was made up of 100 Hides. A Hide was the amount of farm ground required to support a family. I suppose that would be the equivalent of 40 acres and a mule.
Don’t even talk to me about all the trouble involved in annexing and merging.
In post-Northwest Ordinance states (like Wisconsin and Iowa) a township is indeed a 6 mi x 6 mi square of land.
The meaning of “township” varies for states that joined prior to the Ordinance. (It may be different in Texas as well, since it was never a territory.)
OK, Bricker, I’ll do the research for you: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=51057
Here is what the American Heritage dictionary has to say about this:
town (toun) n. 1.a. Abbr. t., T., tn. A population center, often incorporated, larger than a village and usually smaller than a city. b. The residents of such a population center: The whole town disagreed with the mayor. 2. A township. 3. Informal. A city: New York is a big town. 4. Chiefly British. A rural village that has a market or fair periodically. 5. The commercial district or center of an area: going into town for shopping. --attributive. Often used to modify another noun: town streets; town populations. --idiom. on the town. Informal. In spirited pursuit of the entertainment offered by a town or city. [Middle English, from Old English t¿n, enclosed place, village. See dh¿-no- below.]
town·ship (toun ship) n. Abbr. t., T., twp., tp. 1. A subdivision of a county in most northeast and Midwest U.S. states, having the status of a unit of local government with varying governmental powers; a town. 2. A public land surveying unit of 36 sections or 36 square miles. 3. An ancient administrative division of a large parish in England. 4. A racially segregated area in South Africa established by the government as a residence for people of color.
“Town” legally means what the State Legislature or Constitution says it means. In some states, it’s a subdivision of a county (and in some of those states, it has a local government; in others, not). In other states, it’s “an urbanization smaller than a city.” States where the latter is true often subdivide their counties into townships, which may or may not be six miles square.
I live in Pilot, which is a crossroads community in the township of Pilot. The smallest local government with say over the area is Franklin County; neither Pilot nor the township of the same name have legal existence. Due north is the Town of Bunn, complete with Mayor, police, and the usual array of governmental functions.
Before moving to North Carolina, I lived in upstate New York (as it happens, in a small city). I will take Adams, just south of where I lived, as an example. The Village of Adams was a legally established village, with Mayor and Trustees running a village government with police, water and sewer, and all the rest of the stuff. It lay in the Town of Adams, a rural subdivision of Jefferson County which also had local government, a Supervisor and Town Board, a town highway department maintaining the town roads, and so on. Adams Center, north of Adams Village in the center of the Town, was often referred to as a village but was not a legal entity; its government was provided by the Town.
While we’re doing this stuff, though, does anyone familiar with Pennsylvania know what a borough is defined as in that state. I notice villages, boroughs, and cities, apparently in that ascending order of size, as I drive through. But what’s the dividing line (if there is any)? What can a borough do that a village can’t? Why the tripartite division?
Well, my humour anyhoo,
Town = Area less than city size, with between 50,000 and 100,000 inhabitants. (source: made up stats dot com)
Township = Same thing, but on a boat 
That’s nearly as bad as the difference between a fort and a fortress. (A fortress has breastworks.)
In New England, New York, New Jersey, and a few other states, a town is the same as a township in the Midwest, etc. I can tell you about some of the different governmental structures in states I know:
• In Michigan (my original home), the entire state is divided into townships and cities. Townships are subdivisions of counties, and charter townships are incorporated and have more structure and power over themselves – e.g., townships can have their land annexed by a city or incorporated into a village without giving assent; charter townships have the power to block such actions. Villages can be incorporated within townships, and have a village board, administrator, police, etc., but usually share other services (such as fire departments and schools) with the rest of the township. Cities are also incorporated and can include parts of one or more counties, and have all the powers that cities everywhere else have.
• In Vermont, there are cities, towns, and gores. In New Hampshire, there are cities, towns, gores, grants, and purchases. Cities and towns are generally the same as elsewhere. Gores are unincorporated parts of a county that are bits of land that did not get added to any town for a variety of reasons (cut off by mountains, surveying errors long ago, etc.) and are often wedge shaped. Grants were grants of land (duh) made to the state by institutions or individuals out of land that had not yet been assigned in the 18th and 19th Centuries, often for the purpose of raising funds for a school or compensating individuals for military service or financial loss due to actions by the state.
• In Maine, there are cities, towns, gores, grants, purchases, plantations, and townships, both organized and unorganized (the latter of which are referred to by range and township number, similar to the way it’s done in the Midwest, but with multiple meridians across the state). A plantation is a unit of general municipal government unique to Maine. Under general law, plantations have annual meetings and a somewhat simpler governmental organization than towns, but plantations are not accorded the broad home rule and ordinance powers of towns and cities. (For more information, check out the laws in Maine governing local government at the Maine State Government site.)
• In Massachusetts, where I live now, the entire state is divided into towns and cities. In the 1780s the state legislature decided that all land in the state would be part of an incorporated town, doing away with gores and plantations. In 1820, the constitution was amended to allow for the establishment of cities, and Boston was incorporated as the first city in 1822.
And yes it’s true - in most of New England, town officials still must “walk the line” around the edge of the town every few years. According to Maine State law, “Boundary lines between municipalities shall be perambulated once every 5 years to determine whether the boundary location is apparent within 5 meters.”
In Ohio, where I grew up, a township is the next division below a county. A city is never all of a county. All the rest of the county is split up into townships, so if there’s no city in the county, the county consists entirely of townships. There’s usually a dozen or so townships in each county. A town is an incorporated part of a township. In the township where I grew up, Union Township in Hancock County, there were two incorporated towns - Mt. Cory and Rawson. So if you live in an unincorporated area, you have four levels of government above you - the township, the county, the state of Ohio, and the United States. If you live in a town, you have five levels of government - the town, the township, the county, the state of Ohio, and the United States. If you live in a city, you have the city, the county, the state of Ohio, and the United States. But as you can see from this thread, the system is slightly different in each state.
The 36 square mile township began with the 1787 Northwest Ordinance–but not immediately. The first surveyed section of the territories governed by the Northwest Ordinance was the Western Reserve of Ohio (being the land originally claimed by Connecticut on the far side of Pennsylvania that was reserved for sale to indemnify Connecticut for its loss of land). When Moses Cleaveland (correct spelling) and his merry band of surveyors first set out from the Pennsylvania border, the townships they platted were 5 miles by 5 miles. When they got to the section of the Cuyahoga River that was running North, (it makes a large U), they knocked off for a while. When the next band of surveyors picked up the job, they were using 6 X 6 mile townships that continued through the Great Lakes surveys.
I have never discovered why the size of the unit was changed (and admit I have not looked very hard).
Tell that to the annexed portions of Franklin (Columbus) and Marion (Indianapolis) counties. If there is any county property that the cities have not claimed, it is an accident.
In the English language, a town is just a generic term for a small urban area. Under the NJ constitution, however, there are specific rules to cover the five distinct forms of municipal government: City, Borough(sometimes Boro), Town, Township, and Village. These rules govern the structure of the council and other government branches. To make matters more confusing, a municipality has a certain degree of freedom through home rule to ignore some of these constitutional specifications, especially in cases where the local deviations predated that portion of the constitution. On top of all this, a municipality may be a given form of government (say, a city) but retain its traditional name indicating otherwise (e.g. something-boro). Occasionally they’ll try to clarify that, for instance the Township of South Orange Village.
Actually, in Ohio “town” is just an informal term. Municipalities are either cities (5000+) or villages (under 5000 - such as Rawson). See also DSYoungEsq’s post from the What makes a city a city? thread barbitu8 mentioned.
An issue in Ohio that I’ve never figured out is that cities also function as townships in some way. I noticed on a county road map for Stark County that the city of Canton was labelled, in small letters the same font as other townships, “McKinley”. Likewise, Louisville is Constitution Township, Alliance is Butler Township. Let me emphasize that this is different from the township surrounding the city (in these respective cases Canton, Nimishillen, and Washington). Here’s a brief cite that unfortunately provides no further information.