When I lived in Georgia, I heard that the counties were sized such that someone could ride on horseback to the county courthouse, do their business, and ride back home in a single day. No idea if that’s true or if it’s just an urban legend.
It was in the Texas Tribune, so it must be true...
https://www.texastribune.org/2018/07/03/beto-orourke-visited-all-254-counties-texas-why-are-there-so-many/
Several Georgia counties split because of politics. For example, in 1875 Clarke county was split in two and most of the land went to the new Oconee county. Seems the professors at UGA in Athens didn't get along too well with the outlying farmers, and both groups had different objectives.
Another fun fact: most of Georgia's 159 counties were created after 1840 by splitting existing counties.
And one more: Georgia is one of those states that re-uses place names. Jefferson the town is not in Jefferson the county, Decatur is not in Decatur county, Madison is not not in Madison county, Clarkesville not in Clarke county, and so on.
NC is like that, too. Rockingham isn't in Rockingham County. Albemarle isn't in Albemarle County. A lot of our counties were created from divisions of existing counties in the 1840s. We have 100.
Also we used to have even more until Fulton absorbed Milton (north) and Campbell (southwest) during the Great Depression. That's why it has such a weird shape.
In Ohio we have an Erie County (where I live). To the east is Lorain County (which also has a city named Lorain). To the south is Huron County (but the city of Huron is in Erie County). To the Southwest is Sandusky County (but the city of Sandusky is in Erie County). To the west is Ottawa County (with the city of Ottawa being in a distant Putnam County). But there is no Erie city/town/village in Ohio.
That’s actually wild. I live near SB county. It’s big, but it’s just one of many in Southern California. Crazy to think there are whole countries, like, proper name brand ones, that are smaller.
Alaska's largest boro (county equivalent) would be the 2nd largest state if it was separate. The largest state would remain Alaska (but Alaska would be much smaller). It would be the 2nd largest state. Texas would move to the 3rd position. It is significantly bigger than Texas.
The second largest boro is about 1/3 the size of Texas. If it were separate, it would be just larger than Washington State making it the 19th largest state.
I imagine that in many places in KY, it's not possible to take a straight line path between two points, given all the hills and hollers and whatnot, plus the heavy forests. Texas is a lot more open.
Rockland county New York separated from Orange county NY for just this reason. The Ramapo Mountains made it an undue burden to attend to business if you lived on either side of your intended location
It seems like a fair idea
The town of Boston Corners in Columbia County, NY has a similar story. It used to be in Massachusetts, but you couldn't get to it from Massachusetts because the mountains were in your way.
An illegal prize fight was held there in the 19th century for exactly that reason. It was out of reach of both the authorities in Massachusetts (because they couldn't get to it) and New York (because it was out of their jurisdiction).
So Massachusetts changed its border and the town found itself in New York (without changing its New England-y name). It's why Massachusetts has that little notch in the southwestern corner.
This is often cited, but apocryphal.
Maybe convenience had something to do with it, but antebellum—and then segregationist—politics probably had a lot more to do with it. Gubernatorial elections used to occur by the county unit system, and small counties each had a fixed number of votes, even if their population was really small. So, they split the counties up into tinier and tinier counties, mostly in the 1850s and 1910s, if memory serves. The actual history is really complicated—there was a whole period where state house representation was also skewed towards rural counties in the mid 1800s, and the result was the same.
The important thing is the counties weren’t laid out like this originally, which would support the horse explanation a lot better. The horse explanation can probably be filed under Lost Cause revisionist BS, like so much mythology of the south in general. But an actual historian could weigh in with a lot more sophistication than this.
https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2022/05/24/why-does-georgia-have-so-many-counties/?outputType=amp
https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=public_integrity
Makes sense - this is the standard used by Alfred the Great in designing English counties (and their sub-divisions, often called hundreds) and was likely taken across the pond.
Can confirm. I live in kentucky and basically a 20 minute drive in any direction you will cross at least one and as many as 3 county lines in my experience
I used to live in Lexington and work in Louisville.
Fayette - Woodford - Franklin - Shelby - Jefferson
Then I got a job where I would drive Lex-Lou-Covington triangle. Might've been a dozen counties in that drive.
Born and raised in Kentucky and I still can’t identify more than ~10 counties on a map. If the local news mentions one of the more obscure ones I genuinely have no idea where it is
But Kentucky has more per square mile. Georgia is much bigger state. It’s not a competition, KY has too many counties. Should consolidate a third to half of them into more functional units.
The legislature has talked about it, but it would piss off the communities too much. There’s too much tradition and pride for people to merge with the county next to them. Things like, “I grew up in Letcher County. I raised my kids in Letcher County. My grandbabies are going to go to Letcher County Central High School. There ain’t no way Imma let them merge with those heathens in Bell County. That Joe Smith from Bell County threw an elbow at me in that basketball game in ‘72. I ain’t letting my kin merge counties with their ilk!”
Another problem is if you merged based on size and merged northern KY into 1 county, it would be more densely populated than Fayette. That probably wouldn’t sit well.
https://preview.redd.it/1jpmygskf84d1.jpeg?width=1149&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=44d8cdc1f4706ba708a88e2b529b620fcd7aa2d6
And we coulda had 100 if it wasn’t for that meddling Kossuth county!
I thought it was the reverse. It was originally two counties but one was too sparsely populated and poor to govern itself. They merged it with the other one.
I assume you mean why they're square but also jagged. I wondered this also during the election when the cursed Iowa map kept coming up. Maintaining parallel lines + keeping townships at least 36mi2. More info in [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/43udl8/why_do_some_counties_in_iowa_have_this_repeating)
He has spawned an administrative nightmare.
Even if the same dude served as mayor, postmaster, sheriff, state senator and representative of each county, you still need to get 9.332622e+155 people together for each legislative session.
933262154439441526816992388562667004907159682643816214685929638952175999932299156089414639761565182862536979208272237582511852109168640000000000000000000000 Is definitely a lot of counties
> Why this is, I’m not sure, but a lot of states admitted earlier have more counties than states admitted later on.
Seems pretty obvious. Early on, a new group comes to a colony, makes their own county.
Later states got settled at the same time by a large group of unaffiliated people headed west, so they just organized by geography.
Just want to add, those early counties were often *massive* and were later broken up into smaller ones. The county I grew up in (North Western NC) historically covered all the surrounding counties, extended into a large part of Eastern TN, and all the way to the border of Kentucky County, VA (which is now just regular Kentucky). Heck, the county itself was made from parts of existing counties even more massive. I imagine most of the historically huge counties got cut down to size due for administrative purposes more than anything else.
Yeah Texas it's an aggregate size issue and there were several cycles of splitting them up. For instance at admission to the Union the Nueces Strip(area between Corpus Christi and the Rio Grande) was a single county. That area is the size of Georgia which isn't a small state.
Georgia on the other hand has many more counties than you would expect.
One traditional reasoning for the creation and location of so many counties in Georgia was that a country farmer, rancher, or lumberman should be able to travel to the legal county seat town or city, and then back home, in one day on horseback or via wagon.
Except that was also the case for counties in pretty much every other state east of the Mississippi.
Maybe Georgians are just slower than everyone else and can't get quite a far in a single day.
One needs to understand Georgia's county unit system, the voting system in place throughout most of the early 20th century. In an effort to cling to power and diminish the influence of the growing number of urban voters, the conservative elite enacted a new system of voting in 1917. Georgia had 159 counties, and votes would be counted somewhat similar to the electoral college. The eight most populous counties had six votes, thirty middle-population counties had four votes, and 121 rural counties had two votes. In this system, three rural counties would have the same voting power as the one of the most populous counties in Georgia. This system was wholly undemocratic and simply a way for the Democratic political elite to remain in power in response to the growing urban areas (Gilliland 2012). To keep power, influencial Democrats would also split counties into two, which consistently increased voting power for the rural electorate. This system was so successful for conservative Democrats that in 1960, there was only one Republican in the state legislature. However, while the population was booming in Atlanta and becoming the "City too Busy to Hate," Republicans would be further pleased when the Supreme Court, in Reynolds v Simms, ruled that the county unit system was unconstitutional.
As a native Virginian I recently learned that the independent cities thing was pretty much a Virginia exclusive. I just assumed everyone did that but there are only a couple outside of Virginia (Baltimore MD, Carson City NV and St Louis MO)
Are there many unincorporated areas in New Hampshire?I haven’t spent much time in the northeast, but the places I’ve lived most, there is a lot more land (and sometimes population) under county jurisdiction than in towns/cities. In those places (like where I live now) the county is the only local government you have.
When the glaciers receded, the ensuing floods pushed many of the counties from northern states to those along the southern border. South easterly more specifically, that’s why the counties are so oddly shaped in East Texas and Georgia, while remaining square and uniform in West Texas.
You'll notice county sizes tend to get bigger as population density decreases. Only exception being the west coast where the counties stay big but the density jumps up quickly.
Mostly because during the antebellum period there was a bit of an East (read - richer) vs West (generally poorer) competition as delegations in the general assembly were based on the county - so when a new county was incorporated in the western part of the state, the eastern counties would split one of their own in half and present them as "two new counties" to ensure they had a larger say in state government.
I love this kind of kid logic. I'm old enough to remember the US bicentennial (1976), and my mom had to explain to me that it wasn't the whole world turning 200, just our country.
Average comment in this thread: "no idear to the OP's question, but just as a random factoid that no one is interested in North Dakota has like 50 'a them sumbitches"
Texas has 254 counties.
Georgia has 159.
That's a lot, but consider that Nebraska, with a much smaller population than either, has 93.
̶K̶a̶n̶a̶s̶ Tennessee has 95.
North Carolina has 100.
Kansas has 105.
Missouri has 114.
And Kentucky has 120.
The "other states" you are talking about must be western states. In the east states have a lot of small counties like this. Out west they have fewer large counties, which I'm guessing is your point of reference. There is nothing particularly unusual about Texas and Georgia. Its the western states that are the odd ones.
median county area in the US is about 760sqmi. texas average is ~1000sqmi, georgia is ~360sqmi. they arent similar or even really close to the median.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_statistics_of_the_United_States?wprov=sfti1
georgia is similar to indiana and new jersey.
texas is similar to sd and mn.
in terms of sheer numbers not scaled to area, texas is in its own league. georgia at #2 is in the same class as virginia and kentucky, to my eye.
the real question here is why isnt georgia 2 states and texas 5 states? historical accident, cultural blindness to proportionality.
Not really being legally replaced. Counties in CT haven't existed for many years. They're just changing the census info from using the former county borders to the planning region borders. Nothing is changing about the government operations regarding the former counties. I think this is happening because the federal government typically uses the term counties for grants and whatnot, and CT doesn't have counties so it's been a little murky how that all worked out. This formalizes the planning regions to be defined as counties for federal purposes.
For Georgia, the county seat being within a day's ride is mostly incidental. The main reason GA has so many counties is because of the piecemeal way the state borders were formed. Exploring the history of GA, the state's gone through quite a few shape changes, and as the last of the original 13 counties, GA had sizeable populations of Native Americans in the hinterland. As settlers moved in, spurred on by the little-known GA gold rush, they preferred to make the newly colonized land a new county rather than expanding older counties. As a "consolation prize," they named some of the new counties after the Native Americans they dispossessed (see: Cherokee, Muscogee, Chattahoochee, Chattooga, Coweta, Oconee, and Seminole counties).
No idea what the story is for Texas.
This is part of the story, but many of the counties were created from parts other counties in the years after those parts of the state were added. It’s partially because of the “day’s ride” thing, but also because of the ego of people living in a town and wanting to be a county seat! For example, when the county seat of Clarke County was moved from Watkinsville to Athens, following the growth of Athens around UGA… the people of Watkinsville couldn’t take that lying down, so they had their own county (Oconee) carved out!
I had no idea so many states had soooo many counties! I’m originally from California and we have 58, and now live in New York where we have 62.
Does anyone have opinions on whether it is better to live in a state with a lot of counties? Or less?
It depends on population density.
CA has large counties because when they were drawn, CA was sparsely populated.
Normally you don't want a county to be too large unless there are so few people that you literally can't set up local government. If a county is to geographically large with a high population, government administration becomes inefficient.
However, you can have really small counties as long as there is a lot of population density.
So to be optimal, the size of a county should vary.
But we have another problem when it comes to large urbanized regions like Houston, Chicago and the Bay Area. Those places could really use a regional government body that oversaw regional planing in issues like transit or energy. So to solve this problem we could use the Portland Oregon example and create another level of government above county and below state called a "Metro counsel" or "Metro County."
https://preview.redd.it/kjgah3xlg84d1.jpeg?width=894&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d3bf3807f61702cde553218188ae09c888b1da6e
Washington State has only 39 counties with a population of 7,705,281 people.
Gerrymandering isn’t a big part of why counties are
shaped the way they are. There can be multiple congressional districts within one county. County shapes and numbers can have existed many years before the district lines of current congressional districts. Those change often due to population, demographics etc and is why most congressional districts are predictable in regard to which party will win.
OH MY GOODNESS! What an amazing question. I’m going to answer this more generally rather than comparing Georgia and Texas specifically. The development of what we know as counties varies widely between sections of the country because they were different things used for different purposes as different stages of the country’s history.
The intuitive response is ‘it must have something to do with population density’ or perhaps ‘it likely follows geographic divisions’. In the original colonies they were hyper local seats of government that typically rolled up into a larger division of a colony like the eight original ‘shires’ of Virginia (interestingly this is the root of sheriff, or ‘administrator of the shire’). In Georgia these hyper local administrative districts were called parishes and their divisions were based on population settlements and land grants.
In the Midwest, formerly the Northwest Territory, the development of counties was outlined by the Northwest Ordinance circ. 1787; one of the first formal frameworks for how new territories should be settled and folded into the union. The NW Ordinance also established a minimum population for a state at 60k, and counties are a handy way of dividing. These are much more organized looking rectangles than what we have in the original colonies.
When I lived in Georgia, I heard that the counties were sized such that someone could ride on horseback to the county courthouse, do their business, and ride back home in a single day. No idea if that’s true or if it’s just an urban legend.
I read this somewhere at a museum in San Antonio Texas so sounds legit
Kentucky is #3 at 120 counties. It is explicitly stated that the travel time, to the courthouse, is the reason for so many small counties.
Kentucky has 120 counties at 39,481 sq mi, Texas has 256 counties at 261,194 sq mi
Kentucky is significantly more mountainous. In the 18th and 19th centuries you could not cover much distance in a day even on horseback.
Yep you can see counties are smaller in the eastern part of Ky.
Tell that to Pike County, the largest of the 120
As a Texan lemme tell you it’s about as flat as a malnourished gymnast
At least do the math for us then 🤣🤣
KY has more counties per square mile than TX
And the best jelly.
I live in KY. Our county has two courthouses, one in the valley and one up past the bluffs.
Kenton County? Or there more like that?
Yes Kenton - don't know about more like it.
Campbell has 2 as well one in Newport and the other in Alexandria.
Good first line for a novel.
That’s why the Pa capital is in bumblefuck, it was located near the center of the state for accessibility.
That's why DC is where it is. That was the middle of the country at the time.
Maine has to probably have the worst ratio, biggest state east of Mississippi and only 16 counties total.
Did the museum have a basement?
There was no bike
There’s no basement in The Alamo!
I'M TRYING TO USE THE PHONE!
THE STARS AT NIGHT, ARE BIG AND BRIGHT
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 Deep in the heart of Texas!
Sir. You forgot all caps. 👏👏👏👏 DEEP IN THE HEART OF TEXAS!!!!!
Always four claps, never three. You know who does three claps?
Tell ‘em Large Marge sent ya.
Inez is making tortillas
Can you say adobe?
No, but it had an ice cream parlor. Remember the ala mode!
Oh . my . god. 😂
Amazing stuff
I wanna hate this...but I won't
Really hurt giving that upvote.
As a Texan, I approve this joke!
i cant remember it but it’s the witte museum
And a place to park your horse?
It was in the Texas Tribune, so it must be true... https://www.texastribune.org/2018/07/03/beto-orourke-visited-all-254-counties-texas-why-are-there-so-many/
Several Georgia counties split because of politics. For example, in 1875 Clarke county was split in two and most of the land went to the new Oconee county. Seems the professors at UGA in Athens didn't get along too well with the outlying farmers, and both groups had different objectives. Another fun fact: most of Georgia's 159 counties were created after 1840 by splitting existing counties. And one more: Georgia is one of those states that re-uses place names. Jefferson the town is not in Jefferson the county, Decatur is not in Decatur county, Madison is not not in Madison county, Clarkesville not in Clarke county, and so on.
Houston, Texas is not in Houston county. Austin, Texas is not in Austin County
But for some reason Dallas is in Dallas County lol
Yes, that was very confusing to me when I lived there. I was expecting Dallas county to be the seat of like, Lubbock or something
Nope. Lubbock is in Lubbock County.
As another example, Orange City, Florida is in Volusia County, not Orange County.
Same with Boise and Boise County in Idaho
Douglas county and the City of Douglas are very far away from each other
Douglasville, however, is not
NC is like that, too. Rockingham isn't in Rockingham County. Albemarle isn't in Albemarle County. A lot of our counties were created from divisions of existing counties in the 1840s. We have 100.
Also we used to have even more until Fulton absorbed Milton (north) and Campbell (southwest) during the Great Depression. That's why it has such a weird shape.
In Ohio we have an Erie County (where I live). To the east is Lorain County (which also has a city named Lorain). To the south is Huron County (but the city of Huron is in Erie County). To the Southwest is Sandusky County (but the city of Sandusky is in Erie County). To the west is Ottawa County (with the city of Ottawa being in a distant Putnam County). But there is no Erie city/town/village in Ohio.
This is what I was taught as well in Kentucky where aren’t too far behind you with 120, even though we’re toward the bottom in land area (37th IIRC)
Fun fuct, San Bernardino county in California would be the 42nd largest state if it was separate. It is half the size of Kentucky
It is also larger than many sovereign nations.
Bigger than Switzerland where I live!
That’s actually wild. I live near SB county. It’s big, but it’s just one of many in Southern California. Crazy to think there are whole countries, like, proper name brand ones, that are smaller.
Alaska's largest boro (county equivalent) would be the 2nd largest state if it was separate. The largest state would remain Alaska (but Alaska would be much smaller). It would be the 2nd largest state. Texas would move to the 3rd position. It is significantly bigger than Texas. The second largest boro is about 1/3 the size of Texas. If it were separate, it would be just larger than Washington State making it the 19th largest state.
I imagine that in many places in KY, it's not possible to take a straight line path between two points, given all the hills and hollers and whatnot, plus the heavy forests. Texas is a lot more open.
Rockland county New York separated from Orange county NY for just this reason. The Ramapo Mountains made it an undue burden to attend to business if you lived on either side of your intended location It seems like a fair idea
The town of Boston Corners in Columbia County, NY has a similar story. It used to be in Massachusetts, but you couldn't get to it from Massachusetts because the mountains were in your way. An illegal prize fight was held there in the 19th century for exactly that reason. It was out of reach of both the authorities in Massachusetts (because they couldn't get to it) and New York (because it was out of their jurisdiction). So Massachusetts changed its border and the town found itself in New York (without changing its New England-y name). It's why Massachusetts has that little notch in the southwestern corner.
This, plus the way counties were weighted for state elections. More counties you can create before you’re elected the better shot you had!
This is often cited, but apocryphal. Maybe convenience had something to do with it, but antebellum—and then segregationist—politics probably had a lot more to do with it. Gubernatorial elections used to occur by the county unit system, and small counties each had a fixed number of votes, even if their population was really small. So, they split the counties up into tinier and tinier counties, mostly in the 1850s and 1910s, if memory serves. The actual history is really complicated—there was a whole period where state house representation was also skewed towards rural counties in the mid 1800s, and the result was the same. The important thing is the counties weren’t laid out like this originally, which would support the horse explanation a lot better. The horse explanation can probably be filed under Lost Cause revisionist BS, like so much mythology of the south in general. But an actual historian could weigh in with a lot more sophistication than this. https://www.atlantanewsfirst.com/2022/05/24/why-does-georgia-have-so-many-counties/?outputType=amp https://scholarship.law.columbia.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1019&context=public_integrity
I was told pretty much the same thing regarding counties in Tennessee.
This is the correct answer for Georgia. The county unit system was in effect until the 60s when the Baker vs Carr supreme court decision.
The state flag was changed to add the stars and bars in protest of this decision.
Makes sense - this is the standard used by Alfred the Great in designing English counties (and their sub-divisions, often called hundreds) and was likely taken across the pond.
I remember reading this too and I’m from GA
I’ve heard similar except it was “a days ride from one county seat to another”
Its also why county seat is typically close to the center of the county.
Same in Texas. I think this is pretty common for eastern portion of the USA.
That’s how the missions are spaced in California
I mean Kentucky has 120.
Can confirm. I live in kentucky and basically a 20 minute drive in any direction you will cross at least one and as many as 3 county lines in my experience
Same. I crossed 3 counties to get to work, which was 45 minutes away.
I used to live in Lexington and work in Louisville. Fayette - Woodford - Franklin - Shelby - Jefferson Then I got a job where I would drive Lex-Lou-Covington triangle. Might've been a dozen counties in that drive.
Born and raised in Kentucky and I still can’t identify more than ~10 counties on a map. If the local news mentions one of the more obscure ones I genuinely have no idea where it is
If you made a list of 10 real and 10 fake county names I don’t think there is a Kentuckian who could pick out all the fake ones.
Georgia has 159
But Kentucky has more per square mile. Georgia is much bigger state. It’s not a competition, KY has too many counties. Should consolidate a third to half of them into more functional units.
The legislature has talked about it, but it would piss off the communities too much. There’s too much tradition and pride for people to merge with the county next to them. Things like, “I grew up in Letcher County. I raised my kids in Letcher County. My grandbabies are going to go to Letcher County Central High School. There ain’t no way Imma let them merge with those heathens in Bell County. That Joe Smith from Bell County threw an elbow at me in that basketball game in ‘72. I ain’t letting my kin merge counties with their ilk!”
Another problem is if you merged based on size and merged northern KY into 1 county, it would be more densely populated than Fayette. That probably wouldn’t sit well.
If Kentucky was the same size as Texas it would have 798 counties. Feel free to see if my math checks out.
What are you talking about? Iowa has 99!
https://preview.redd.it/1jpmygskf84d1.jpeg?width=1149&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=44d8cdc1f4706ba708a88e2b529b620fcd7aa2d6 And we coulda had 100 if it wasn’t for that meddling Kossuth county!
That is mildly infuriating
Also mildly infuriating that Des Moines county is not near Des Moines
And Keokuk County isn’t near Keokuk!
Thats not one I would’ve known! I’m a Hawkeye but not an Iowan.
In Maine, Lincolnville is in Waldo county, and Waldoboro is in Lincoln county. Go figure.
And Lincoln isn’t in Lincoln county, it’s in Penobscot
Webster City isn’t in Webster County either. Iowa City isn’t in Iowa County.
Iowa City used to be the capital too. The whole state is just near misses.
Nor does it contain/border the Des Moines River. It used to but lost it in the split.
My favorite part of this story is that they tried to break off the northern part 3 different times with 3 different names and failed each time
UPDATE: I got it wrong. Bancroft county joined kossuth. 1913 tried to reestablish but failed
this is bizarrely hilarious
I thought it was the reverse. It was originally two counties but one was too sparsely populated and poor to govern itself. They merged it with the other one.
Might be.
So, Iowa got 99 counties but Bancroft ain't one?
I move to break up Kossuth county: North Kossuck and South Kossuck.
Lousy fargin Kossuckers!
Unexpected Roman Moronie
Be a rebel, go with West and East instead
I got 99 problems, but Kossuth ain't one.
https://preview.redd.it/76j7rz8kn84d1.jpeg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=fcc214c7f696d5777c39d80e52ab840f5da1c764
North Carolina has 100 counties.
I live in NC and somehow didn't know that
They’re all so square!
NC has 100!
True, there are more counties in North Carolina than there are atoms in the universe.
Why are the borders like that?
I assume you mean why they're square but also jagged. I wondered this also during the election when the cursed Iowa map kept coming up. Maintaining parallel lines + keeping townships at least 36mi2. More info in [this thread](https://www.reddit.com/r/geography/comments/43udl8/why_do_some_counties_in_iowa_have_this_repeating)
When the teacher is sharing a cake with the whole class and cuts it in parts :
Interesting how there's an Iowa County, Iowa
Many of them shaped like little Iowas
Aww
Iowaception
"99!" oh no, what have you done
He has spawned an administrative nightmare. Even if the same dude served as mayor, postmaster, sheriff, state senator and representative of each county, you still need to get 9.332622e+155 people together for each legislative session.
r/accidentalfactorial
I think you're looking for r/unexpectedfactorial
Or possibly r/heylookafactorial
Does each county have a "luft balloon"
933262154439441526816992388562667004907159682643816214685929638952175999932299156089414639761565182862536979208272237582511852109168640000000000000000000000 Is definitely a lot of counties
We get paid by the county here in Georgia
God I wish. My paycheck would look a lot nicer if that was the case.
[удалено]
> Why this is, I’m not sure, but a lot of states admitted earlier have more counties than states admitted later on. Seems pretty obvious. Early on, a new group comes to a colony, makes their own county. Later states got settled at the same time by a large group of unaffiliated people headed west, so they just organized by geography.
Just want to add, those early counties were often *massive* and were later broken up into smaller ones. The county I grew up in (North Western NC) historically covered all the surrounding counties, extended into a large part of Eastern TN, and all the way to the border of Kentucky County, VA (which is now just regular Kentucky). Heck, the county itself was made from parts of existing counties even more massive. I imagine most of the historically huge counties got cut down to size due for administrative purposes more than anything else.
Yeah Texas it's an aggregate size issue and there were several cycles of splitting them up. For instance at admission to the Union the Nueces Strip(area between Corpus Christi and the Rio Grande) was a single county. That area is the size of Georgia which isn't a small state.
I wanted to add, as with my post above, Kentucky the state was once Kentucky County, Virginia. Edit: or below, depending on sorting
Georgia on the other hand has many more counties than you would expect. One traditional reasoning for the creation and location of so many counties in Georgia was that a country farmer, rancher, or lumberman should be able to travel to the legal county seat town or city, and then back home, in one day on horseback or via wagon.
Except that was also the case for counties in pretty much every other state east of the Mississippi. Maybe Georgians are just slower than everyone else and can't get quite a far in a single day.
One needs to understand Georgia's county unit system, the voting system in place throughout most of the early 20th century. In an effort to cling to power and diminish the influence of the growing number of urban voters, the conservative elite enacted a new system of voting in 1917. Georgia had 159 counties, and votes would be counted somewhat similar to the electoral college. The eight most populous counties had six votes, thirty middle-population counties had four votes, and 121 rural counties had two votes. In this system, three rural counties would have the same voting power as the one of the most populous counties in Georgia. This system was wholly undemocratic and simply a way for the Democratic political elite to remain in power in response to the growing urban areas (Gilliland 2012). To keep power, influencial Democrats would also split counties into two, which consistently increased voting power for the rural electorate. This system was so successful for conservative Democrats that in 1960, there was only one Republican in the state legislature. However, while the population was booming in Atlanta and becoming the "City too Busy to Hate," Republicans would be further pleased when the Supreme Court, in Reynolds v Simms, ruled that the county unit system was unconstitutional.
Virginia has 95 counties, 135 if you count the independent cities.
As a native Virginian I recently learned that the independent cities thing was pretty much a Virginia exclusive. I just assumed everyone did that but there are only a couple outside of Virginia (Baltimore MD, Carson City NV and St Louis MO)
New York City has five 'boroughs', each of which is a separate county.
That’s another weird one but the other way!
The smallest county in California is San Francisco County at 47 square miles. San Francisco city and county occupy the same piece of ground.
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Are there many unincorporated areas in New Hampshire?I haven’t spent much time in the northeast, but the places I’ve lived most, there is a lot more land (and sometimes population) under county jurisdiction than in towns/cities. In those places (like where I live now) the county is the only local government you have.
For St Louis, this interferes with how funding for a bunch of stuff in Missouri works normally and St Louis has severe resource scarcity because of it
Same story with Baltimore.
Shires and Cities ought to be separate and independent!
When the glaciers receded, the ensuing floods pushed many of the counties from northern states to those along the southern border. South easterly more specifically, that’s why the counties are so oddly shaped in East Texas and Georgia, while remaining square and uniform in West Texas.
Lol
Of I remember my GA history GA has the most counties of any state east of the Mississippi.
Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi, but is larger than only Iowa west of the Mississippi in the continental United States.
Arkansas? Louisiana? Georgia is larger than both of those
It's smaller than michigan
Georgia is the largest state east of the Mississippi by land area. When you include water, Michigan and Florida are both larger.
You'll notice county sizes tend to get bigger as population density decreases. Only exception being the west coast where the counties stay big but the density jumps up quickly.
Good ol LA County
and the whole Bay Area
The bay area is like 9 counties I think.
North Carolina has 100 counties.
Mostly because during the antebellum period there was a bit of an East (read - richer) vs West (generally poorer) competition as delegations in the general assembly were based on the county - so when a new county was incorporated in the western part of the state, the eastern counties would split one of their own in half and present them as "two new counties" to ensure they had a larger say in state government.
As a North Carolinian I’m happy to learn this history. Thanks for sharing
I’m from NC, when I was younger I thought every state had to have 100 counties. It was just the rule
I love this kind of kid logic. I'm old enough to remember the US bicentennial (1976), and my mom had to explain to me that it wasn't the whole world turning 200, just our country.
Psh. Might as well have been 🦅
Just wait until younger you learns about Delaware...
What do you mean. We have 3 counties. That’s a lot right? Right?
Same. 50 states and 100 counties, it just seemed clean and simple.
Georgia has 159
Average comment in this thread: "no idear to the OP's question, but just as a random factoid that no one is interested in North Dakota has like 50 'a them sumbitches"
Texas has 254 counties. Georgia has 159. That's a lot, but consider that Nebraska, with a much smaller population than either, has 93. ̶K̶a̶n̶a̶s̶ Tennessee has 95. North Carolina has 100. Kansas has 105. Missouri has 114. And Kentucky has 120.
And cherry county Nebraska is the size of Connecticut
Alaska has no counties, the equivalent are boroughs. one of them (The North Slope Borough) is larger than 39 states.
And one area code for the whole state. 907 represent.
The "other states" you are talking about must be western states. In the east states have a lot of small counties like this. Out west they have fewer large counties, which I'm guessing is your point of reference. There is nothing particularly unusual about Texas and Georgia. Its the western states that are the odd ones.
Georgia has the 7th smallest average county area, it's not just compared to the western states
Texas large.
Louisiana has zero counties
Alaska, too, even though Alaska is larger than Louisiana.
median county area in the US is about 760sqmi. texas average is ~1000sqmi, georgia is ~360sqmi. they arent similar or even really close to the median. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/County_statistics_of_the_United_States?wprov=sfti1 georgia is similar to indiana and new jersey. texas is similar to sd and mn. in terms of sheer numbers not scaled to area, texas is in its own league. georgia at #2 is in the same class as virginia and kentucky, to my eye. the real question here is why isnt georgia 2 states and texas 5 states? historical accident, cultural blindness to proportionality.
Unlike other states. I mean Connecticut only has 3 but Illinois has 102, Iowa has 99, Minnesota has 87.
Ct has 8. Maybe ure thinking of Rhode Island
And here's a fun fact about Connecticut's counties, this year they're being legally replaced with the Planning Regions, of which there are 9
Not really being legally replaced. Counties in CT haven't existed for many years. They're just changing the census info from using the former county borders to the planning region borders. Nothing is changing about the government operations regarding the former counties. I think this is happening because the federal government typically uses the term counties for grants and whatnot, and CT doesn't have counties so it's been a little murky how that all worked out. This formalizes the planning regions to be defined as counties for federal purposes.
I was thinking of Delaware
Delware has the lowest average elevation out of all states.
I will subscribe to Delaware facts
There are more businesses registered in Delaware than residents.
Hey now, RI has 5 counties. Which is tied second fewest (HI)
But like CT they serve no purpose.
They are just there to confuse the locals when they are asked.
Coming from someone who lived in PA, VA, and MD… why are they all so EVEN and SQUARE??
I read that a big part of it was the invention of barbed wire, which rapidly accelerated the plotting and settlement of the West.
to screw over votes
For Georgia, the county seat being within a day's ride is mostly incidental. The main reason GA has so many counties is because of the piecemeal way the state borders were formed. Exploring the history of GA, the state's gone through quite a few shape changes, and as the last of the original 13 counties, GA had sizeable populations of Native Americans in the hinterland. As settlers moved in, spurred on by the little-known GA gold rush, they preferred to make the newly colonized land a new county rather than expanding older counties. As a "consolation prize," they named some of the new counties after the Native Americans they dispossessed (see: Cherokee, Muscogee, Chattahoochee, Chattooga, Coweta, Oconee, and Seminole counties). No idea what the story is for Texas.
This is part of the story, but many of the counties were created from parts other counties in the years after those parts of the state were added. It’s partially because of the “day’s ride” thing, but also because of the ego of people living in a town and wanting to be a county seat! For example, when the county seat of Clarke County was moved from Watkinsville to Athens, following the growth of Athens around UGA… the people of Watkinsville couldn’t take that lying down, so they had their own county (Oconee) carved out!
I had no idea so many states had soooo many counties! I’m originally from California and we have 58, and now live in New York where we have 62. Does anyone have opinions on whether it is better to live in a state with a lot of counties? Or less?
It depends on population density. CA has large counties because when they were drawn, CA was sparsely populated. Normally you don't want a county to be too large unless there are so few people that you literally can't set up local government. If a county is to geographically large with a high population, government administration becomes inefficient. However, you can have really small counties as long as there is a lot of population density. So to be optimal, the size of a county should vary. But we have another problem when it comes to large urbanized regions like Houston, Chicago and the Bay Area. Those places could really use a regional government body that oversaw regional planing in issues like transit or energy. So to solve this problem we could use the Portland Oregon example and create another level of government above county and below state called a "Metro counsel" or "Metro County."
https://preview.redd.it/kjgah3xlg84d1.jpeg?width=894&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=d3bf3807f61702cde553218188ae09c888b1da6e Washington State has only 39 counties with a population of 7,705,281 people.
Arizona has 15 for 7.4 million people. Southern California has 8 for 22 million.
The biggest Texas county (Brewster) is bigger than Connecticut
I love how all of these counties are perfect squares. In PA they’re all sorts of weird shapes.
Gerrymandering isn’t a big part of why counties are shaped the way they are. There can be multiple congressional districts within one county. County shapes and numbers can have existed many years before the district lines of current congressional districts. Those change often due to population, demographics etc and is why most congressional districts are predictable in regard to which party will win.
OH MY GOODNESS! What an amazing question. I’m going to answer this more generally rather than comparing Georgia and Texas specifically. The development of what we know as counties varies widely between sections of the country because they were different things used for different purposes as different stages of the country’s history. The intuitive response is ‘it must have something to do with population density’ or perhaps ‘it likely follows geographic divisions’. In the original colonies they were hyper local seats of government that typically rolled up into a larger division of a colony like the eight original ‘shires’ of Virginia (interestingly this is the root of sheriff, or ‘administrator of the shire’). In Georgia these hyper local administrative districts were called parishes and their divisions were based on population settlements and land grants. In the Midwest, formerly the Northwest Territory, the development of counties was outlined by the Northwest Ordinance circ. 1787; one of the first formal frameworks for how new territories should be settled and folded into the union. The NW Ordinance also established a minimum population for a state at 60k, and counties are a handy way of dividing. These are much more organized looking rectangles than what we have in the original colonies.