County (United States)

• 1. Introduction

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  The county is one of the oldest political units in American life. Depending on where you live, you may vote in one, pay property taxes to one, or get buried in one without ever giving it much thought. Yet the county quietly shapes nearly every interaction between a citizen and their government. There are 3,144 counties and county equivalents spread across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. As of 2017, more than half the entire U.S. population was concentrated in just 143 of them. That is 4.6 percent of all counties holding the majority of the country. How did this patchwork of local units come to be, and why does Los Angeles County alone contain more residents than 41 individual states? Those questions lead back more than four centuries to a colonial swamp in Virginia, and forward to a debate that never really ended about who should govern whom.

• 2. Origins in English Law

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  Virginia created the first American counties in 1617, when the House of Burgesses divided its colony into four units it called "incorporations." By 1634, those had grown and hardened into eight shires, each with an English-style name: James City, Henrico, Charles City, Charles River, Warrosquyoake, Accomac, Elizabeth City, and Warwick River. The oldest intact county court records in the country survive at Eastville, Virginia, in what is now Northampton County, with documents dating to 1632. Maryland followed with its own first county, St. Mary's, in 1637. The Province of Maine founded York County in 1639, and Massachusetts established its county system in 1643. The concept the colonists were transplanting was not invented in America. English settlers brought with them the county model they already knew from the British metropole, where it had organized local governance for centuries. Pennsylvania and New York took the additional step of delegating substantial power from colonial government down to the county level, establishing the template that most of the United States would eventually follow. New England charted a different course. There, counties remained relatively weak, with towns and cities holding the real weight of local authority.

• 3. A Patchwork of Equivalents

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  Louisiana has no counties. Neither does Alaska. Louisiana's local units are called parishes, a name rooted in the state's French and Spanish colonial past, when the Catholic Church dominated civil life on the land. Of the original 19 civil parishes that date from Louisiana's statehood in 1807, nine were named directly after the Roman Catholic parishes from which they were governed. Alaska's delegates to the 1955 Constitutional Convention made a deliberate choice to abandon the traditional county model and build their own system of boroughs instead, each varying in its powers and duties. The United States Census Bureau formally recognizes these and other non-county units as "county equivalents" for administrative and statistical purposes. Alaska's vast Unorganized Borough, a single expanse larger than France and Germany combined, has no county-style government at all. The Census Bureau divides it into 11 census areas purely for statistical use. Connecticut abolished its county governments entirely in 1960. An application to have the state's nine councils of governments recognized as county equivalents was made to the Census Bureau in 2019, approved in 2022, and fully implemented by 2024. The newest county in the country is Broomfield, Colorado, a consolidated city-county established in 2001 from parts of four existing counties.

• 4. Population Extremes

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  Los Angeles County, California, counted 10,014,009 residents in 2020. That figure exceeds the entire population of 41 U.S. states and is 17.4 times greater than the population of Wyoming, the least populous state. Cook County, Illinois, the second most populous, had a population of 5,275,541, larger than 28 individual states. At the opposite end sits Loving County, Texas, with just 64 residents in 2020. The median county in 2019 was Nicholas County, West Virginia, with a population of 25,965. The average across all U.S. counties that same year was 104,435. In the 50 states and the District of Columbia, 45 counties have populations exceeding one million, while 35 counties have populations below 1,000. New York County, coextensive with the borough of Manhattan, is the most densely populated county in the country, with 72,033 people per square mile in 2015. The Yukon-Koyukuk Census Area in Alaska stands at the opposite extreme: the largest county-equivalent by land area in the nation at 145,505 square miles, and simultaneously the least densely populated, with 0.0380 people per square mile in 2015.

• 5. How Counties Are Named

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  More than 2,100 of the 3,144 counties in the United States are named after people, most of them political figures or early settlers. Washington County, honoring the first president, is the most common county name with 31 instances. Jefferson County, for Thomas Jefferson, is second with 26. The most common counties named after non-presidents are Franklin with 25, and both Clay and Montgomery with 18 each. The most recent president to have a county named in his honor was Warren G. Harding, a reflection of how slowly new counties have been created since New Mexico and Arizona achieved statehood in 1912. Geographic features come next in frequency. The most common geographic county name is Lake. Particularly in the region of the original Thirteen Colonies, many counties carry the names of locales in the United Kingdom. Words and names from Native American languages appear across many counties, as do names of French or Spanish origin, such as Marquette County, named after French missionary Father Jacques Marquette. The term "parish" used in Louisiana traces to the French paroisse civile and Spanish parroquia, both stemming from the period before the Louisiana Purchase when the Catholic Church administered much of local governance.

• 6. Governing Power and Its Limits

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  Connecticut and Rhode Island use counties only as geographic lines drawn on a map. They have no governing power. Maryland sits at the opposite end of the spectrum, where counties and the city of Baltimore handle nearly all services including public education. Hawaii's counties are similarly broad in scope, since no formal municipal layer exists below the county in that state. In most Midwestern and Northeastern states, counties are subdivided further into townships or towns, which hold some of their own local powers. In New England, governmental authority below the state level rests primarily with towns and cities, with counties functioning at most as judicial districts and sheriff's departments. Rhode Island's counties have lost even those functions. The board governing a typical county can hold powers spanning all three branches of government: legislative authority to enact local ordinances, executive authority to oversee county operations, and limited quasi-judicial authority over matters such as planning appeals. Several key officials in many counties are elected separately and cannot be removed by the board, including the county clerk, treasurer, sheriff, and others. Long-term incarceration is rarely a county responsibility, and the execution of capital punishment is never one. County-level trial judges are officers of the state's judicial branch, not of county government.

• 7. Cities Within, Cities Beyond

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  There are 41 independent cities in the United States, cities that legally belong to no county. Thirty-eight of them are in Virginia, where any area incorporated as a city is automatically outside county jurisdiction. The others are Baltimore, Maryland; Carson City, Nevada; and St. Louis, Missouri. A different kind of fusion exists in 40 consolidated city-counties, where a city and county merge into a single entity. Augusta-Richmond County in Georgia and the City and County of San Francisco, California, are among the named examples. New York City occupies a category of its own: five boroughs, each coextensive with a full county of New York State. Manhattan corresponds to New York County, the Bronx to Bronx County, Queens to Queens County, Brooklyn to Kings County, and Staten Island to Richmond County. Dallas, by contrast, spreads across portions of five counties without fusing with any of them. Alaska has produced some of the geographically largest cities in the world through borough-city mergers, though their population densities remain far below those of conventional urban areas. San Bernardino County, California, is the most extensive true county at 20,057 square miles. The least extensive is Kalawao County, Hawaii, at just 11.991 square miles.