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Courthouse tour of the US

B

barryg

Active member
Been reading my Dec. OTL, mainly Bob Higdon's county court house tour of the 48 continuous states. 3,069 of them. Over 5 years, 150,000 miles, 3400 gallons of gas. Unbelieveable. Our Arkansas BMW club (Naturally Beemers) had a simular type run, the county seat tour of Arkansas. I did it back in '90-'91 covering 75 counties and 85 county seats. Just can't imagine me doing 47 more states. Congrats Bob on a job well done. PS I live in one of the county seats U came thru, Marion, Ar.. U remember that one don't U.
 
Don't forget about all the ones he did twice due to a corrupted camera memory card :)
 
Goes back to the 1800's, a lot of the counties have rivers running thru them and back then the rivers had ferry crossings not bridges, floods were long term affairs, people couldn't get to court due to the floods and ferry closings. Some counties designated a 2nd county seat to take care of court preceedings in areas so affected. Anyway, even with the building of modern roads and bridges those counties have chosen to keep their twin county seats. As an aside, when I graduated from Batesville High School in '71 there were 6 ferries in operation less than 100 miles from my home. I rode the Oil Trough Ferry on White River to work every day to Newport, Ar.. Now the only Ar. ferry still in operation is the Bull Shoals Lake ferry at Peel Ar.. Part of the passing of the good old days.
 
Just remembered this. When I did the county seat tour of Ar. back in 90/91 their were still 2 ferries operating in south Ar.. Got to ride the one over the Red River at Doddridge. The one over the Ouachita River at Moro Bay was closed due to flooding. Both now have bridge crossings.
 
barryg said:
Goes back to the 1800's, a lot of the counties have rivers running thru them and back then the rivers had ferry crossings not bridges, floods were long term affairs, people couldn't get to court due to the floods and ferry closings. Some counties designated a 2nd county seat to take care of court preceedings in areas so affected.
Click to expand...

Mississippi has a similar situation: 82 counties and 92 county seats. Your explanation is the same story I heard here. I was initially skeptical of the story. I had a call in to a historian, but he never called me back, so I really don't know.

For us, the counties with two seats are spread over the state. Some are in the delta, some are in the piney woods, and one is on the coast. The geography story makes sense in some of the cases. In other cases, it may have been a shift in economic power (why should I have to go across the county to take care of business). A third possibility is that the legislature was just a weenie and wasn't willing to decide between towns (why not just have two counties?).

At the beginning, both county seats fulfilled the entire role of a county seat. As infrastructure changed so that the county didn't need both seats, they split up functions: birth and death records in one seat, licenses and taxes in the other.

Isn't there at least one southeastern state that has cities that aren't part of a county?

Noel
 
In Tn. I think Nashville grew to the point it encompassed the whole county of Davidson. I think they finally combined city and county governments to streamline the system.
 
Thanks, barryg, for explaining that. Makes sense to me.

On the not-in-a-county topic, California has 58 counties. One is the "City and County of San Francisco." The city government is the county government, and vice-versa. There are a few distinctions: In popular usage, SF is always referred-to as a city, not a county. Cities in CA don't have sheriffs, but SF does - he runs the jails, provides court security, and serves process. The attorneys who attend to the city's civil law business are, predictably, city attorneys, but their work is indistinguishable from what the 57 other counties call "county counsel."
 
There are all sorts of oddities. In Arkansas the head of the county government is the county judge. I think that is the same in Tennessee. But Shelby County in which Memphis is located the head of the county government is the county mayor. Really just confusses people. Down in Louisiana they don't have counties, but have parrishes. Those crazy French.
 
Alabama

I was pretty certain that Alabama had a similar situation. Turns out that St. Clair county, east of Birmingham has two county seats: Ashville and Pell City. I think that's the only example in Alabama, and I don't know how that example happened either.

Noel
 
Funny you should mention this. I bought a bike from Bob that had been used on this tour. He put 40,000 miles on it in exactly 1 year. That's some ridin' right there, I don't care who you are;)
 
naddy100 said:
Isn't there at least one southeastern state that has cities that aren't part of a county?Noel
Click to expand...

All cities in Virginia are totally independent of the county. They have to have separate government, fire departments, police departments, schools, etc. Several years ago a law was passed that forbids the cities from annexing the surrounding counties (due to abuse) so the cities can't expand. Several small cities have reverted back to town status where they are part of the county and share services. If you live in a city, you pay city taxes but don't pay county taxes. However, you pay both county and town taxes if you live in a town.

From what I have been told, counties in Virginia were sized and the county seat was placed so the citizens of the county could go to the courthouse and back home in one day on a horse. Maybe that is why many counties in the mountains are smaller than many counties in flat country.
 
Connecticut has seven counties, but none have any county land to administer. Every square foot of the state is inside incorporated communities. :scratch
 
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