What’s the smallest town in Minnesota with a mayor?

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FUNKLEY, MINN. ‐ If the vibe of a town’s name determined its size, Funkley would be booming. People love Funkley’s name so much that they make a habit of stealing the City of Funkley sign as a souvenir.

But there are just 13 people living here, according to Mayor Emil Erickson.

“It has grown since I moved here,” he said. “It was down to five.”

He used to run the town’s only business, the Funkley Bar and Lounge, but the watering hole familiar to hunters and anglers heading north of Bemidji closed eight years ago.

Ryan Pederson was wondering about places like Funkley, one of the state’s tiniest communities.

He asked Curious Minnesota, the Strib’s reader-driven reporting project: Which Minnesota locale has the smallest population yet is still incorporated, with an elected mayor?

“Having grown up in South Dakota, I’ve driven through many, many of those small towns where it’s just, you know, a couple people. I knew Minnesota had its fair share as well,” said Pederson, who now lives in St. Louis Park.

His grandfather was the mayor of Sisseton, S.D., in the ’80s, which even back then was exponentially bigger than Funkley.

For years, Minnesota’s unofficial “smallest” title oscillated between Funkley and the tiny town of Tenney, just 8 miles east of the North Dakota border, in Wilkin County.

When Tenney dissolved in 2011, becoming part of Campbell Township, Funkley claimed the “teeniest” ranking.

Now another super small community in the state is tied for the title.

Thirteen people live in Kinbrae, 320 miles south of Funkley near the Iowa border, according to Mayor Nick Carlson.

And a population drop on the horizon will soon make Kinbrae the smallest: Two people plan to move out next month, Carlson said.

It gets tricky to pinpoint the exact size of small towns. Census Bureau data is stale. A town’s listed population (online or on a road sign) is often not a true snapshot in real time.

When places are so small that one person moving in or out could drastically shift the smallest-town list, every head in the count matters.

“People are born and people die and people move. So any kind of population number ... it’s very dynamic,” said State Demographer Susan Brower.

Brower’s office doesn’t carry out exact counts, but determines population estimates based on the number of occupied households.

According to 2020 estimates, Kinbrae had 10 and Funkley was tied with Barry in Big Stone County as being the smallest with five households, she said.

To find true head counts, we checked with each of these towns' mayors.

Barry Mayor Danica Gary said some people have moved in and out of town in the past year.

Asked for the current population, she counted out loud, “... 11, 12, 13, 14. It’s 14.”

Technically, all of these places are “cities,” according to Minnesota statute, which uses the word “town” to refer to 36-square-mile townships. In the 1970s, the state made all “villages” and “boroughs” statutory cities.

“Minnesota is a small-city state. So unlike other states in the nation, a lot of our cities are very, very small, under 5,000 in population,” said Amber Eisenschenk, League of Minnesota Cities research manager.

Life in Kinbrae isn’t for everyone, but it is peaceful, said Carlson, the mayor.

He and his wife moved to Kinbrae a decade ago to be near family in Heron Lake. His three children, who go to school 10 miles away in Fulda, have space to run around.

His family can take the boat out on Kinbrae Lake, which is so clear you can see all the way to the bottom, he said.

Carlson’s been mayor for four years. He’s a bit sheepish about winning his re-election 2-0 last November: the only votes came from his wife and him.

Like many mayors in small towns, Carlson wears a lot of other hats in the community 20 miles north of Worthington. Besides being the snowplow driver, he runs the only business in town — an auto repair shop in the former post office.

“The whole town’s kind of a little family, so kinda everybody takes care of each other,” said Carlson.

One recent weekday, Randy Grunewald walked into Carlson’s auto shop. The 65-year-old retiree is known as the town’s unofficial historian, on account of being a resident for 55 or so years.

Carlson’s auto shop is a stop on Grunewald’s twice-a-day walks around town, which take all of 20 minutes.

He goes past a “TRAVEL AT YOUR OWN RISK” sign at the edge of town, where the red asphalt county highway turns into a gravel road. He also walks by the shuttered Kinbrae supper club, once known for steaks that would attract 300 guests to town each weekend night.

The town wasn’t so small in years past. Grunewald remembers Kinbrae in the 1960s and ’70s, when there were about 55 residents, a general store and a grain elevator, he said.

But over the years, he’s seen residents move out and houses torn down.

Most jobs in the region are in Worthington or Windom, drawing residents away from Kinbrae, said Carlson.

And the town is set to shrink further soon. Felicia Wallace, 27, and her boyfriend moved into Kinbrae from Roswell, N.M., in 2023, intending to fix up the supper club as a residence.

But renovating the aging restaurant was more difficult and more expensive than expected. They’re planning to move out next month, which would give Kinbrae the unofficial title of smallest town.

The tiniest of small towns with local governments are rare.

Brower, the state demographer, said just under 6,000 people lived in a city with a population less than 100 in 2023.

Still, not many have dissolved in the past 15 years besides Tenney.

“I think Minnesotans are very proud of their history and their identity of the community they were raised in, that their families were raised in,” said Eisenschenk, of the League of Minnesota Cities.

Voters have to approve dissolution. For Tenney, it came down to a 2-1 vote. But sometimes folks don’t want to let their town go.

Such was the case for Cass County’s Boy River in 2018. A special election to dissolve failed in a 3-2 vote. Boy River’s population estimate is nearly 30 — a big town, depending on perspective.

Kinbrae once considered dissolving, too. In 2009, it was up for discussion, but the town decided to stay incorporated.

Carlson, the mayor, said he doesn’t see dissolving the town on the agenda anytime soon. “We would lose our streetlights and our city garbage disposal,” he said.

And Kinbrae could see growth again soon. Someone is building a house on the south side of town, he said. That means the town could grow by two or three people by summer.

It’s a development he welcomes, even if “it’s gonna knock us out of the running for smallest town.”

That would return the title to Funkley, the old logging community whose history was for years intertwined with the local bar.

“It’s quiet,” said Carrie Erickson, the mayor’s wife, standing at the bar table inside what she called “the last of the true road houses.”

Now the bar is the Ericksons' house. Gone are the pool tables, stripper poles and miscellany of bras stapled to the ceiling. A walk-in closet replaced the walk-in cooler.

The absence of glowing neon signs doesn’t mean folks don’t drop by for a beer.

“Even after all these years, they still walk in. Sometimes it scares the living heck out of you,” Carrie said. “The other night, someone came knocking on the door at 2 o’clock in the morning.”

Emil added: “He needed a pull.”

Small-town living is when the mayor pulls you out of a snow-covered ditch.

For several years after the bar closed, Funkley had no businesses. Then Keith Carsella opened up his greenhouse in 2020.

Carsella, who is also the city clerk, helped the mayor fix up an old cabin to serve as City Hall. “That’s the nice thing about a small town — you’re like a family,” Carsella said.

Mayor Erickson said there is no talk of dissolving Funkley.

“We’re trying to build it up, not tear it down,” he said.

As part of the process for population estimates, Brower’s office “invites challenges.”

“Some of the very small ones do write back with handwritten notes,” she said, saying “so and so passed away.”

They give “very detailed information ... nothing like we get from the big cities,” she said.

The Minnesota Star Tribune welcomes challenges, too. If you live in a town with a population of less than 13 and a mayor, let us know. Leave a comment or send us a note at curious@startribune.com.

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