County seat

The old Queen Anne's County courthouse (1708), Maryland, U.S.

In most of the United States, counties are the political subdivisions of a state. The city, town, or populated place that houses county government is known as the seat of its respective county. Generally, the county legislature, county courthouse, sheriff's department headquarters, hall of records, jail and correctional facility are located in the county seat, though some functions (such as highway maintenance, which usually requires a large garage for vehicles, along with asphalt and salt storage facilities) may also be located or conducted in other parts of the county, especially if it is geographically large.

A county seat is usually, but not always, an incorporated municipality. The exceptions include the county seats of counties that have no incorporated municipalities within their borders, such as Arlington County, Virginia (where the county seat is the entire county[2]). Ellicott City, the county seat of Howard County, Maryland, is the largest unincorporated county seat in the United States, followed by Towson, the county seat of Baltimore County, Maryland. Likewise, some county seats may not be incorporated in their own right, but are located within incorporated municipalities. For example, Cape May Court House, New Jersey, though unincorporated, is a section of Middle Township, an incorporated municipality. In some of the colonial states, county seats include or formerly included "Court House" as part of their name, (e.g. Spotsylvania Courthouse, Virginia).

The provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Nova Scotia have counties as an administrative division of government below the provincial level, and thus county seats.

In the provinces of Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia the term "shire town" is used in place of county seat.

Miaoli City is the county seat of Miaoli County.

County seats in China are the administrative centers of the counties in the People's Republic of China or the Republic of China.

Xian have existed since the Warring States period and were set up nationwide by the Qin dynasty.[3][4] The number of counties in China proper gradually increased from dynasty to dynasty. As Qin Shi Huang reorganized the counties after his unification, there were about 1,000. Under the Eastern Han dynasty, the number of counties increased to above 1,000. About 1400 existed when the Sui dynasty abolished the commandery level (郡 jùn), which was the level just above counties, and demoted some commanderies to counties.

In Imperial China, the county was a significant administrative unit because it marked the lowest level of the imperial bureaucratic structure;[5] in other words, it was the lowest level that the government reached. Government below the county level was often undertaken through informal non-bureaucratic means, varying between dynasties. The head of a county was the magistrate, who oversaw both the day-to-day operations of the county as well as civil and criminal cases.

The current number of counties mostly resembled that of the later years of Qing Dynasty. Changes of location and names of counties in Chinese history have been a major field of research in Chinese historical geography, especially from the 1960s to the 1980s. There are 1,355 counties in Mainland China out of a total of 2,851 county-level divisions.

In Taiwan, the first counties were first established in 1661 by the Kingdom of Tungning. The later ruler Qing empire inherited this type of administrative divisions. With the increase of Han Chinese population in Taiwan, the number of counties also grew by time. By the end of Qing era, there were 11 counties in Taiwan. Protestant missionaries in China first romanized the term as hien.[6] When Taiwan became a Japanese colony in 1895, the hierarchy of divisions also incorporated into the Japanese system in the period when Taiwan was under Japanese rule. By September 1945, Taiwan was divided into 8 prefectures (州 and 廳), which remained after the Republic of China took over Taiwan.

Currently there are 13 county seats in Taiwan, which are in the forms of county-administered city, urban township or rural township.

Allentown, Pennsylvania, the third largest city in Pennsylvania and county seat of Lehigh County, May 2010

Many county seats in the United States feature a historic courthouse, such as this one in Renville County, Minnesota, pictured in May 2015.

In the United States, a county is an administrative or political subdivision of a state that consists of a geographic region with specific boundaries and usually some level of governmental authority.[7]

• Chef-lieu, administrative centres in Algeria, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Switzerland, and Tunisia
• County seat war, disputes between towns in the formation of the United States
• County town, administrative centres in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom
• Municipality, equivalent to county in many countries

• National Association of Counties