What makes a village a village?

I have been wondering, what makes a village different from everything else?

Is there something special about a village to you?

Any stories that come to mind?

I am not looking for only LITERAL differences, but perhaps experiences that set villages apart from other living situations.

I think a village is a place where you know everyone else who lives there.

(Even if you're as socially awkward as I am.)

I think a village is a place where most daily and weekly needs can be met, you might need a trip out or an Amazon order once a month.... and as Christopher says it is possible to know everyone, if not well, then at least know something about them - where they live, their kids names, that their dog died last month....


source

All of that, plus a sense of community. Shared events, like in Nancy's photo. Knowing who you can call on for whatever problem. And being willing to help others if they're the ones dealing with challenges.

Without that, it's just houses close together.

My thoughts:

1) it is some municipality—a geographical location

2) it is small, this is important because although the numbers are small,

3) The social connections run deep.  Either through family, extended family or friendships.  And therefore

4) Not only does everyone know everyone else, but there is a special social connection across the village.  People support each other.  Someone will have your back if something goes wrong.




My favorite example was Crainville, Illinois.

I will be shocked if anyone reading this post even knows where Crainville is.  Crainville is sort of the suburban section of Carterville, IL.  But calling it a suburb is preposterous.  It is a smaller village tucked 3/4 inside of the slightly larger Crainville and really, the two make for one community.

I might have had the best set of random neighbors I ever had when I lived in Crainville.  I moved there when I first started teaching.  Being a last minute hire, there were few rental options, and although the house was a disaster, the neighbors were wonderful.  I knew that I was moving into an area where roots ran very deep, and I wanted to be on people’s good side.  

Being a first year teacher, I was overwhelmed with work.  My only “me time” that I granted myself was a walk sometime between 4:00 and 6:00 each afternoon.  I deliberately made myself a visible presence.  I smiled, waved at people as they smiled and waved at me.  It didn’t take long and I got to be known around the village as “the walking man.”  I really didn’t have all that many face-to-face conversations, but when I did, I would get a replay of where I walked in days prior.

This might be off putting to some, but I put it to use.  People knew that I left for work very early.  My neighbor across the road was a janitor at a local grade school and he saw that I had left for the day before he ever left his house.  Word spread that I was a hard, dedicated worker, teacher.  When I got my water bill from the village, I walked right down and paid it as a part of my walk.  And all of this had its intended effect.

Even though I was an outsider, I was informally invited into the community very quickly. My neighbors would always let me know if I let my headlights on in the truck (the alarm was broken).  I would be gone for the summer (seeing my then girlfriend, now wife).  Although I forwarded the mail, once the water bill came late enough that I had a late penalty.  When I walked into the water office to pay, I asked if the late fee could be waived and the office manager immediately said of course, I was always the first every other month.  I even had one woman try to set me up with her sister (I declined politely).

My point with all of this was that I went from being a total stranger to being a full member of the community with all of the social backup and protection it offered quickly.  It pained me to move (from the community—the house was a dive!)

In a village, someone always has your back.



Eric

Hi Eric,

I used to live in Carterville.  Anyway, there  are certainly legal definitions of village in some states/countries.   I think in terms of the boundaries between what is larger and what is smaller. I suppose larger would be a town and smaller would be a settlement. A town would be incorporated and have a formal system of government with government services such as a fire department, I would expect there to be a grocery store, hardware store,  maybe a small restaurant/ pub, church, . I would see a settlement as a cluster of houses without most of those things.  

A village I would put between those two.   Maybe a government but lacking a fire department and police force.  

John,

Carterville….Really?!?!  When was that?

I lived in Crainville (Carterville) from August 1997-August 1999.  I then lived in Cambria from August 1999-June 2000.  I then moved to Carterville and lived there till Thanksgiving Day, 2004.

I am shocked to just hear another person even know about Carterville.



Eric

I've been told by reliable people, that "outsiders" can have a rough time breaking into the "Village" community. Eric found one way to do it, but here's another:

My Cousin got transferred to Haileybury, Ontario. He didn't really have the qualifications for the job, but the company had tried to transfer 2 other before him and they hadn't lasted 6 months. My Cousin was from a fairly small Ontario town, so they thought he might fit in better. The first thing his wife did was get a part-time job at Tim Hortons. They had no trouble being accepted when Timmy's new server could address everyone by name!

Eric Hanson wrote:
In a village, someone always has your back.

This! With the only addition: I’d make sure I had everyone’s in return.

Jay Angler wrote:I've been told by reliable people, that "outsiders" can have a rough time breaking into the "Village" community.

I would add that not only that but community is typically invisible to those outside of it. Once someone breaks in, it starts to become clear that it exists, but before this, you are naturally going to be clueless, except for some light shining around the edges. That is because the community consists of relationships, not institutions: institutions are highly visible in their nature, but they are not community.

It makes me wonder about intentional communities and eco villages for this reason—if you can see it from the outside how is it actually community? What you can see and talk about is just the dress, the raiment of community. If people these days are not being exposed to actual community and try to make one by getting together and living together, will they be able to do it? There is a saying about how most intentional communities fail. Maybe that is because the people making them, do so because they were deprived of real community and try to recreate what they can see from the outside without the opportunity to understand what’s inside.

I believe that community works because/when everyone has their own space that’s enough for them. How this gets figured out is trial and error. Figuring out what too close or too far is…I have some relationships that are too close and are causing me major trouble. But taking up spears and driving away the people with whom I am frustrated is not going to result in healthy community. Calling each other bad people, getting on each others’ nerves, stepping on heels and toes… that is a fast route to community death! If you can get a little farther away you might notice you can still love people at a distance. It may be that you can’t, but these things happen and we try to make the best of it. We also need to recognize when we need others despite their flaws and give thanks for what they give us.

Writing about this makes me so happy…even just writing about it. Community is such a treasure, there is nothing to compare. I am grateful for being present in it.

The issue of why it’s hard to get into community is that there’s no “community” Thing to get into. It is like going into “The Mountains”. You go hike up to a little hill and ask, am I in the mountains yet? No, you’re on a hill, but there are some big mountains over there you couldn’t see before. Then you hike up the big mountain. Am I in the Mountains? No, you’ve just climbed one big mountain. You’re on A mountain but not The Mountains. The same is true with any of the numerous mountains and valleys. You can sure tell when you’re not in the mountains or any mountain, though.  There is no destination or center, you are where you are and community is built around that. Community is the most natural thing.

I might have more to say… getting tired though

Jay Angler wrote:I've been told by reliable people, that "outsiders" can have a rough time breaking into the "Village" community.

When we moved here we took over the local store/Post Office - that's certainly a good way to be known and get to know everyone! "What's said in the shop stays in the shop" though

M Ljin wrote:There is no destination or center, you are where you are and community is built around that.

I really like this M Ljin - so profound! You always take yourself with you, so community starts with yourself and your attitudes.

M Ljin wrote:
There is no destination or center, you are where you are and community is built around that. Community is the most natural thing.

So true, a beautiful reply! It's like the story about the old guy sitting at a town entrance, watching travellers come and go. Sometimes people stop and ask him what the town is like, is it a good place to live. He asks each what the last town they lived in was like, then no matter what they answer, his reply is "You'll find this town much the same."

Real community is mostly invisible, and we are always the centre of our own community. It's the networks we form, patterns of giving and receiving. Like mycelium around a tree root.

Like the image posted by Nancy ... the people!

My intent was to be highly visible in as innocuous an activity that I could—-what could be more inoffensive than walking about, smiling & waving.

I wasn’t surprised that the community learned that I left for work very early.  And they also surmised (correctly) that I worked hard—just the kind of attributes that one would want in a new neighbor.

And before long, my late bill was getting the fee excused and one woman tried half-heartedly to make me a part of her family.  Basically I wanted to send an informal, but public and direct message that I was a valuable member of their community.

It didn’t hurt that they occasionally saw me with my then-girlfriend, now wife or that I was gone on the weekend visiting her—it sent the message that in addition to hardworking, I was dedicated and reliable.

I deliberately sent this message so that I would quickly be accepted by the community.  A few years later, my wife and I bought our first home in Carterville, the slightly larger (though the neighborly sentiment remains identical) enveloping community mostly surrounding Crainville.  This was after I had been gone for a year at a different, separate thought nearby community called Cambria.  

Once back in Carterville in my new house with my new bride, I had a knock on the door one evening and three women were at the door and announced that they were from the Carterville welcoming committee.  They brought my wife and I a flower set for our table.  I invited them in and we chatted for a while.  I let them know that I taught at nearby Carbondale Community High School, and that my wife was a resident at SIU residency.  This information was received not with surprise or curious interest, but almost as if it were confirmation, as if their visit was as much a welcome as it were intelligence gathering.  But they were not intrusive at all.  They were friendly and neighborly.  I don’t know for certain, but I always suspected that they were trying to confirm that I was the same person who walked all up and down Crainville, that they were happy that I was now married and my wife and I lived in their community.  I think that they simply wanted us to stay, to feel welcome, and to be a permanent part of the community,

But our house was a starter house—great for the two of us, tiny for three of us!  And I always (of course!) had dreams of owning land, not a 1/2 acre lot.  And I felt a touch obligated to live in my High School district.  When we moved, it actually hurt a little bit.  Carterville/Cambria had been home for several years and they welcomed a stranger like family.  And I felt like family.  Carterville/Cambria was one of the best places I ever lived.  I love where I live and I would never trade it, but the community and neighbors of Carterville/Cambria were second to none.


Eric

'What makes a village a village?' Difficult question. I think many different answers are possible.

Probably it depends on where you live. Where I live there are two kinds of places: towns (or maybe cities, in Dutch 'steden') and villages ('dorpen' in Dutch). The difference has nothing to do with size or how many people live there. It;s only historical. Long ago for some reasons some places were able to get the privilege to build a wall all around, with one or more gates, so the place was protected. Then these places were called towns/cities. The open, unprotected places were villages. That's all.

And so it's possible that there's a 'town' existing of only two streets and some 30 inhabitants, while one of the larger places in the Netherlands exists of a cluster of villages ...

Wendell Berry’s compact description of a community says it all to me:

“A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other’s lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”

Curiosity compelled me to search my vast store of digital photos with the term “community.” The search algorithm (that most devilish of inventions) actually got it right this time, more or less. What appeared was pic after pic of people grouping together for all sorts of purposed activity. Also mixed in was a pic of my ouse, my garden, our town’s main street, and one particularly poignant, somewhat grainy pic of my daughter’s wedding, which I attached. The attractive young lady with the black sweater and big smile, standing there in front, is shown just before she caught the thrown bouquet. Seven months later she became my daughter-in-law.

It's the people.
My partner is a great village maker. The day we moved into an apartment on an old street in Brampton, Ontario, Canada, my partner and roommate introduced themselves to the neighbors working on a roof. Next thing I hear he was up on the roof, not moving our thibgs into the apartment, to my shagrin. But I realized that we had a fast friend in a neighbor before we had even moved out of the old place. He grew up in a small northern town, and you knew everyone, and everyone knows his family there. I grew up more isolated in a southern ontario city as my single parent was less social than average and there was a different "mainstream", media+church culture that made me an outsider from an early age. I've learned the village habits, but still have to work at it as my instinct is to be anonymous, or at least mysterious, to provide protection to myself. But that is not really how it works, you need your village of people, plants, waterways, landscapes and animals to give you a delightful life.

I used to live in a small coastal village in Maine called Bayside.  It's been a state-incorporated village municipality since 1915 when the village was purchased by the current members of the Wesleyan Campground that began at the turn of the century.  Today, it's still thriving with a core of folks that are multigenerational in Bayside alongside a nice diversity of newer folks from all over the country who wanted to settle in a beautiful, safe, and socially warm and inviting, true village.  The main historical district is composed of cozily situated, small Victorian cottages that evolved from the tent platforms of the meeting ground. Newer homes cover the hillside and shores of Penobscot Bay.  It's definitely a middle-class family village in home size.  What makes Bayside a village is really its village culture, one that is rooted in the neighborly New England traditions of respect, civility, and community that is reinforced by an active social life of village events, village organizations, as well as meeting groups of friends.  Along with village celebrations of all the American holidays, it has an arts and culture organization that puts on events, an inexpensive yacht club for everyone even if without a boat, a historical society, a garden club, and many more organizations that come and go with interests.   As I did, folks want to live in Bayside for its village community culture, of working with each other for the common good, its inclusive diversity, and its family safe and caring environment.  Everyone knows and respects each other, regardless of politics, income, or ethnicity, because that's just what happens in its village culture.  Folks come and go, are born or pass on, but the village remains the same, now for well over a century, because of its timeless culture.

Denis’ description of Bayside, Maine, tugs at the heart.

Happily, and not incidentally, his description could easily stand in for my own town, and of course many other old places.

Denis wrote that Bayside is “… still thriving with a core of folks that are multigenerational in Bayside alongside a nice diversity of newer folks from all over the country…”

It occurs to me that, of the two groups, the former (the multigenerational family) is the indispensable one. These are the folks most securely tied to their place and thus the ones with the fullest knowledge of it and faithfulness to it. It’s difficult to overstate the importance. Without an investment of time it’s difficult, maybe impossible, to developing a complex understanding of a place, and it is complex understanding that prevents inhabitants from being careless with their place.

Notably, old-timers seem to have an innate, natural tendency to adapt themselves to their place (another way of saying “preserve” their place) while newcomers can easily go the other way, expecting a place to adapt to them. The latter invites a squandering of conventions and traditions that maintain long term functionality (ironically the very characteristics that make a place attractive to newcomers in the first place).

There’s a joke where I live that you’re not a “local” until your grandfather was born here. I used to roll my eyes when I heard it, but as time has passed and more knowledge of my place has come to light (stuff "I didn’t know that I didn’t know”), the joke holds more sagacity than humor.

I hope this doesn’t come off as lecturing…