How Many Counties In Massachusetts

Have you heard the one about Mitt Romney at the "Ask Mitt Anything" event? It seems that someone asked him how many counties Massachusetts has. Mitt said "thirteen." An aide corrected him and said "ten." The actual answer is fourteen.

It's true that this displays less ignorance than one might imagine since county-level government in the Bay State is fairly insignificant. The weird thing, though, is that Romney for some reason felt he couldn't admit that he didn't know. Presidents are bound to face topics they don't know anything about (nobody could be knowledgeable about every issue that crosses the Oval Office) and need to respond to ignorance in appropriate ways.

Comments

"13" as opposed to "14" doesn't sound like a guess. it sounds like he thought he knew....and was pretty close.

Posted by Nathan | August 9, 2007 3:29 PM

If history repeats, Mitt is a shoe-in to be the next President, just as the last winner could not name the President of, of all the places, Pakistan.

Posted by gregor | August 9, 2007 3:31 PM

Why isn't Plymouth in Plymouth county?

Posted by Marshall | August 9, 2007 3:32 PM

Counties in MA may not be as improtant as in, say, NY, but one thing I have learned from my brother-in-law (a higher up in the Commonwealth gov't) is that about 30% of the prisons in MA are still run by the counties. Add this to the fact that we still elect county sherriffs. So, while county gov't is insignificant compared to state and municipal stuff, it still exists. And someone like, say, the Governor of MA should know their counties.

Then again, I know that Romney could really give a rat's rearend about MA, and that is why such a fact escapes him.

Posted by rlgordonma | August 9, 2007 3:33 PM

Sorry for the typos..."important" and "sheriffs"

Posted by rlgordonma | August 9, 2007 3:34 PM

When I was in Junior High, we had to memorize all the counties in Ohio. There are 88 of them.

Posted by blah | August 9, 2007 3:35 PM

Note also that the Barnstable/Dukes/Nantucket are treated as the "Cape and Islands" for some purposes relating to county government. So 12? 14? Who's to say?

Posted by alkali | August 9, 2007 3:40 PM

Also, some counties don't actually exist any more. Hampshire county, for example, was disbanded, and replaced with the voluntary-association "Hampshire Council of Governments".

Posted by Nathan Williams | August 9, 2007 3:46 PM

Why isn't Plymouth in Plymouth county?
It is.

More importantly, Suffolk County is entirely to the north of Norfolk County. I assume this is a colonial-era naming quirk: people from Norfolk, England settled one part and people from Suffolk, England settled another.

Chester, PA, however, is not in Chester County, PA.

Posted by SDM | August 9, 2007 3:50 PM

Suffolk is north of Norfolk? Essex and Middlesex but no Wessex? They're just making it up as they go along, aren't they?

Posted by monkey.dave | August 9, 2007 3:50 PM

And what's with the non-contiguous counties?

Posted by Al | August 9, 2007 3:56 PM

I think many are overlooking the fact that, to be an electable Republican candidate in this country, not only do you have to be ignorant of many facts, you have to accept numerous OUTRIGHT FALLACIES, many in regards to raw science (global warming, evolution) and glaringly obvious foreign policy realities (Iraq, Iran, Israel). Ignorance is not our enemy; truthiness is. Romney feels in his gut (because his base says he has to) that we can win in Iraq, and therefore we can. This is despite all the facts arrayed that demonstrate that not only can we not "win" in Iraq, but that winning was never even a realistic outcome.

Posted by Gregorio | August 9, 2007 3:57 PM

Maybe he just thought it was 13.

Posted by Naveen | August 9, 2007 4:17 PM

Karl Rove would say: Massachusetts was one of the 13 original colonies, arguably the most important colony, and therefore, the number makes sense. Besides, there ARE 13 counties in Massachusetts. And 12. And 14. Your point?

Posted by Gregorio | August 9, 2007 4:20 PM

Brookline, one of the non-contiguous bits of Norfolk County, successfully fought annexation by Boston in the late 19th century. Boston did manage to annex other towns in Norfolk County and make them part of Suffolk County, thus cutting off Brookline from the rest of Norfolk County. I'm not sure about the other non-contiguous bit.

Posted by Danny | August 9, 2007 4:26 PM

What's interesting is that when he was running for Governor, he DID know the number of counties in Massachusetts.

Another flip-flop from Mitt!

Posted by Jayhawk Max | August 9, 2007 4:26 PM

There's only one county that matters, and that's Brisco County, Jr.

Posted by Gregorio | August 9, 2007 4:28 PM

Remember how Robert Reich got slammed for not knowing that Berkshire County was the westernmost county in the state? It became a regualr feature of coverage of his campaign for the Democratic nomination for Governor.

Obligatory partisan double standard remark here.

Posted by lemuel pitkin | August 9, 2007 4:29 PM

Suffolk is north of Norfolk? Essex and Middlesex but no Wessex? They're just making it up as they go along, aren't they?

I knew a Scottish fellow studying in Boston who was occasionally driven to distraction by the jumble of Massachusetts place names derived from British names that were in turn derived from actual geographical relationships and features.

Posted by Warren Terra | August 9, 2007 4:31 PM

Everybody knows that the county divisions in Massachusetts were laid out by cows.

These were not the cows that laid out the roads in Boston. Those cows had to be destroyed. Very sad.

Thanks,
-V.

Posted by Vardibidian | August 9, 2007 4:45 PM

From what I understand, the towns of Hingham and Hull split off from Norfolk County and joined Plymouth County because it was easier to get to the county seat of Plymouth by sea than to the Norfolk County seat of Dedham by land. That stranded the town of Cohasset as an exclave of Norfolk County. You can see that otherwise, the southern boundary of Norfolk County is perfectly straight.

Posted by Brittain33 | August 9, 2007 4:51 PM

More trivia: Martha's Vineyard used to belong to New York, and Dukes County was named in tandem with Dutchess County.

Posted by Brittain33 | August 9, 2007 4:53 PM

Al, the other non-contiguous bit is Cohasset, which is in Norfolk County; my educated guess is that the Town of Cohasset was once part of Massachusetts Bay Colony (i.e., Winthrop, the Mathers, the capital P Puritans) as opposed to Plymouth Colony (i.e., the Pilgrims, half of whom were "adventurers", i.e., came for non-religious reasons), which was independent until the early 1690s, before being absorbed by Massachusetts Bay after the Glorious Revolution. The two were actually somewhat distinct societies.

As a native of Plymouth County, I am thankful that Massachusetts and not New York, which tried to wrest the County (along with the Cape and Islands) away, took control.

Posted by Ben Cronin | August 9, 2007 4:56 PM

Did these same Cows teach Bostonians to drive and how to root for their baseball team?

A real good Boston accent makes you long for the dying quacks of a mangled duck. I had a Bostonian teacher in 5th grade and haven't touched poultry since. Living in Cambridge for a year was made bearable only by cuddly presence of one M. Yglesias.

Posted by Gregorio | August 9, 2007 4:57 PM

I see Britain33 has beaten, and aparrently, corrected me.

Posted by Ben Cronin | August 9, 2007 4:58 PM

Remember how Robert Reich got slammed for not knowing that Berkshire County was the westernmost county in the state? It became a regualr feature of coverage of his campaign for the Democratic nomination for Governor.

Obligatory partisan double standard remark here.

I'll add an obligatory defense that there is no partisan double standard there. Not knowing that the Berkshires are in the western part of Massachusetts is a LOT more egregious than not knowing the number of counties.

Posted by Al | August 9, 2007 4:58 PM

Only 14 counties? Only 14?

California has 58, which range from Los Angeles County with just under 10 million inhabitants to Alpine County, which has a population of 1,208. Texas has 254 counties, and Georgia has 159.

Posted by burritoboy | August 9, 2007 5:07 PM

Until I just looked it up right now, I couldn't tell you that my native New York has 62 counties. I hail from Suffolk County, and of course there is no corresponding Norfolk county.

The only screwy thing about New York counties I can recall is how New York City works. In short, the boroughs of NYC are also counties of NY state. Their government is city hall, but they each have their own courts and DA. Also, county names differ from borough names for most of them (Brooklyn = Kings County, Staten Island = Richmond County, Manhattan = New York County).

Posted by Cain | August 9, 2007 7:12 PM

burritoboy:

While the great Commonwealth only has 14 counties, it has 351 cities and towns, most of these direct democratic Towns, and there is no unincorporated land or "county land." This is true of all New England except Maine, which has many unincorporated townships.I find this cool.

Posted by Ben Cronin | August 9, 2007 8:05 PM

monkey dave: Actually, although still sometimes used for poetic purposes (e.g., by Thomas Hardy), Wessex has not legally existed in England either for a thousand years (and Middlesex, for that matter, has been gobbled up by Greater London). Massachusetts is missing Sussex, however.
Ben Cronin: I agree. I was shocked when I found out that there were states where there could be land not belonging to a town. I find the New England system much more sensible.

Posted by James Kabala | August 9, 2007 8:17 PM

I want to say that I have no idea how many counties there are in California- the state in which I grew up - except that someone has already answered that question, and of course I have never been governor. Nor do I have any special sympathy for Professor Romney (although I hope - probably in vein - his Party will be dumb enough to nominate the man).

I'm a northern-southern half-breed. A plurality of my father's people came to Essex County in the last century of European cannibalism, and occasional sectarian genocide; they were Pikes, and Hales, and Swetts.

But when someone mentions Norfolk County I think of my 3rd great-grandfather on my direct paternal line who gave me my last name; his father died before he was twelve, the proud, decent legacy of this family who helped to govern this town in west Prussia since the middle ages was over. He fled to Hanover (the Kingdom) in 48 for the Revolution, and sent his sons to a Jewish school; he was a liberal. He suffered the same economic and cultural disenfranchisement which would lead the descendants of so many others to Nazism. He fled to Massachusetts with his wife and three surviving sons on the eve of the Prussian invasion in 1866; he barely stayed afloat, asked nothing of his sons. His wife died before him. America is a country of hucksters, thieves.

As I see it, both parties are devoted to enriching their own special interests - corporations, public employee unions, the unworking and half-working poor, the rich - at the expense of his descendants and the descendants of people like him.

Posted by Linus | August 9, 2007 10:33 PM

There's probably less than a hundred people who would know the answer to this question, and most of them are on this list:

cohp.org/ma/massachusetts.html

Posted by TLB | August 9, 2007 11:07 PM

Local government in the US is pretty much a mess, anomalies like Brooklyne and Cohasset being pretty much common, and the usual effects are to screw the cities and to multiply bureaucracy. The Commonwealth of Massachussetts should be praised for getting rid of the anachronistic counties for most purposes, and just going with the Commonwealth itself and the towns and Boston. It removes a whole lawyer of bureaucracy and rationalizes things.

Most states would be better off with just the state government, a government that covers the metropolitan area of the largest cities (similar to LA County), then local governments, with no intermediary between the local government and the state government for rural areas. However, with all due respect to the Berkshires, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts pretty much is the Boston metro area government, so the setup there comes close to this ideal.

Posted by Ed | August 9, 2007 11:55 PM

Re: "the Commonwealth of Massachusetts pretty much is the Boston metro area government;"

Yes, and the Berkshires are hinterland, aggrieved colonies, and have been since Shays' Rebellion.

There was a saying in W. Mass. during the 18th C. that "good Massachusetts wisdom" could not be found east of Worcester.

Posted by Ben Cronin | August 10, 2007 12:12 AM

Ed,

I actually agree with you - does anybody anywhere ever actually know who is on their County Board? The only reason I do actually know mine is that the City of San Francisco is the same as the County of San Francisco (i.e. our board of supervisors for the city is also the county board of supervisors). Otherwise, these things seem to be useless. Even worse, counties play a negative role in the South - where every state has a huge number of counties (unpopulated states like Mississippi and Alabama have nearly 100 counties each). Part of the Potemkin Village of local governance charade in the South.

Posted by burritoboy | August 10, 2007 12:20 AM

More than likely Mitt did admit he didn't know, then changed his answer.

Posted by aleks | August 10, 2007 4:58 AM

Does any state besides Massachusetts have non-contiguous counties? I don't think so, but please correct me if I am wrong.

Posted by Hal | August 10, 2007 8:11 AM

The other correct answer is 6.

From the mass.gov page on counties:

"The following county governments have been abolished, though still existing as geographical entities: Berkshire County, Essex County, Franklin County, Hampden County, Hampshire County, Middlesex County, Suffolk County and Worcester County"

Posted by snoey | August 10, 2007 10:39 AM

I find the list of abolished counties astonishing as I know for a fact that Suffolk and Middlesex each have their own DA and court system (not to mention Suffolk's famous county holiday of "Evacuation Day" (the day the British left Boston) that falls on St. Patricks Day). It is true, however, that in MA the county system is largely ignored compared to states like NY and TX. I believe it mostly to be a factor of size both geographically and population. I too was surprised when I found out there are some states with unincorporated townships.

Posted by Mick | August 10, 2007 11:58 AM

In Michigan, you can actually be governed by up to 3 layers of local government. (county, township and village) This only applies to people who live in a village, which has very little authority over things like roads and elections, so the township government still controls some things.

Most people live in just a county and a city or a township, though.

One thing that's good about all these layers of bureaucracy is that we don't have as many election problems as other states seem to have.

Posted by witless chum | August 10, 2007 12:09 PM

Mick: Worcester County, my home county, still its own D.A. and sheriff, but it no longer has largely unnecessary offices like county commissioner and county treasurer. I presume that this is what the web site is referring to when it says Worcester and seven other counties have "abolished county government."
It's interesting that except for Norfolk County, the counties retaining county government are all southeastern, ex-Plymouth Colony counties. Does anyone from around there know if county government actually plays a larger role around there than it used to do elsewhere in the state, or is it just coincidence?

Posted by James Kabala | August 10, 2007 9:25 PM

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