An acre was traditionally meant to be the amount of land that a farmer could plow in a day with a farm animal's assistance.
40 acres was traditionally the amount of land necessary for a single family of unmechanized subsistence farms to support themselves. It is the most typical economic unit in which farmland and vacant land is sold, even today.
40 acres and a mule was what post-U.S. Civil War advocates for reparations to former slaves had advocated for (and obviously, did not achieve).
A square 40 acre plot is a quarter mile on each side (a.k.a. 1320 feet a.k.a. 440 yards), with a one mile circumference and a 16th of a square mile area.
The population density of subsistence farmers at this traditional pre-modern scale is about 100 people per square mile.
A survey township has 36 square miles (6 miles a side) and was traditionally the presumptive size of the smallest unit of local government, which at subsistence farming population density would have had about 3,600 people, and perhaps a bit more for a hamlet of perhaps 400 people who would make up the 10% or so of non-farmers who would have been present in a predominantly subsistence farming pre-modern society at the technology level that would have prevailed around the time of the American Revolution (250 years ago), so it might have had a total population of about 4,000 people. Non-farmers in hamlets like this would often include clergy, craftsmen in the skilled trades, doctors, veterinarians, and merchants.
In the brief period where there was democratic government and a predominantly pre-modern subsistence farming economy, people under age twenty-one couldn't vote, and neither could women, so perhaps 400-500 of those people would have been eligible to vote and/or participate in town meetings (in areas without slavery, as slaves couldn't vote either and were usually used to farm cash crops in any case).
In townships that were not governed in the town meeting style of New England towns, a typical town council would have had three elected trustees and sometimes an elected town clerk as well, so about one voter per 100 to 167 people would have been elected officials. This rate is similar to the rate at which people serve as precinct organizers in modern political parties.
A community of this size might have a single church that doubled as a community center and while pre-mechanized subsistence farming largely predated universal public education, a township would typically have something on the order of 2,000 school age children.
In that era about a quarter of children would have died in their first year and about half would have died before reaching adulthood. In any given childbirth, about 1% of pregnant mothers would have died in childbirth, and a typical woman would give birth six to eight times in a lifetime, leading to an excess of widowers over widows. There would be post-menopause age grandmothers in the community, but far fewer, proportionately, than there are today. Most elderly people would have lived with extended family. Then, as now, about a third of pregnancies would have ended in a miscarriage or stillbirth.
It would be unusual for a subsistence farming community to have more than a handful of people with post-secondary education (perhaps a priest and a government official or lawyer), and the percentage of people with the equivalent of a full high school education today would have been comparable to the percentage of people with graduate degrees today, although in some regions, a significant number of people without formal second education would nonetheless have been quite well-read autodidacts. Journalists and school teachers and merchants would typically not have a post-secondary education and would often not have the equivalent of a high school diploma today.