Atlas of Historical County Boundaries

Abstract

The goal of the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries project is to compile and publish all changes in American county jurisdiction from colonial times to 1990. Many people seek that information -including historians, geographers, genealogists, political scientists, librarians, and demographers and their needs have shaped the scope, content, and format of the work. The historical significance of American counties lies in their important functions, their nearly universal distribution, and their protean nature. These counties and their equivalents (that is, the parishes of Louisiana and independent cities in four other states) today embrace within their bounds every part of the forty-eight coterminous states and Hawaii. (Connecticut abolished its counties as operational institutions in 1960; Alaska is the only state that has never had counties.) The American county, a local arm of state government, was transplanted from England early in the seventeenth century. Since then its functions have grown from law enforcement to probating wills, recording deeds, and handling civil actions. The recording of births, deaths, and marriages was a natural addition, and eventually much of the work of census taking was organized around the county. Some counties also acquired many of the functions of local government, including welfare administration, road and bridge maintenance, and property evaluation and tax collection. Outside densely settled urban areas, counties were the obvious geographical units for organizing representation in the provincial, territorial, and state legislatures and for building congressional districts; in the nineteenth century, counties became the grass-roots centers for political parties. Following independence from Great Britain, American settlers pushed westward, and state and territorial governments laid out counties ahead of them, trying to attract them with an implicit promise of governmental services. Such frontier counties often were not organized and nearly as often were attached temporarily to fully operational counties for services and record keeping. Without such an attachment, an unorganized county existed only on paper as a name and a boundary description. This atlas not only shows the territory within each county's prescribed boundaries but also, for the first time, maps the arrangement of temporary attachments. The functional importance of counties is not matched by a comparable geographic stability, and today few have their original shapes and areas. Some counties were designed so that all residents could conveniently travel to the county seat, others so that one political party could control the electorate. Most important, regardless of design, is the simple fact of change. The purpose of this atlas is to help researchers find old records and interpret historical data, two tasks regularly impeded by the changes in county boundaries. Did