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Town meetings are principally held in the northeastern United States, with a heavy concentration of them in the New England states. This may be appropriate since this is the region where this style of government seems to have its origins. Joseph F. Zimmerman, professor of political science at the State University of New York at Albany’s Rockefeller College of Public Affairs and Policy and author of The New England Town Meeting: Democracy in Action, believes that the earliest New England town meetings were the result of necessity as new communities developed. "It just sprung up naturally on the rocky shores of Massachusetts because certain decisions needed to be made. There was no provision in the Massachusetts Bay Company Charter for anything other than a colonial government, called the general court, so people just made decisions on their own." In order to reach these decisions, some kind of structure would be needed, and this, according to Zimmerman, had some of its roots in old England. "In some of the Protestant churches in England at the time, the church members of the local parish would attend what they call a vestry meeting, and there they made decisions such as a hiring a new minister, building a new church. So the vestry meeting is somewhat similar to a town meeting." As communities grew beyond the first Massachusetts settlements, the town meeting continued to be an important forum for making local decisions. Town meetings are popular to this day in northeastern towns, but they did not thrive far beyond this region.
 As populations moved west with the United State’s boundaries, the town meeting form of government did not take hold. Frank M. Bryan, professor of political science at the University of Vermont and author of Real Democracy: The New England Town Meeting and How It Works, believes that the wide expanses of the West were partly responsible for this. "The (New England) towns were smaller and the geography was more conducive to clustering and getting together, whereas it isn’t on the prairie and the Great Plains. They tired it in places, but it just didn’t work out….There are town meeting-like meetings in Minnesota, that’s the only other place that has them. They have meetings in the townships to vote on budgets in the evenings, but they’re not full blown town meetings like New England has."
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