There is an interesting 24-page essay written and published in 2012 by the National Association of Counties. It offers a “history and overview of county government in the U.S.”
You may find it helpful in shedding some light not only on the history of county government, but also on the importance and role it has played and continues to play.
Today’s counties are arguably the most flexible, locally responsive and creative governments in the United States. Certainly they are the most diverse, varying impressively in size, population, geography, and governmental structure. In their politics and policies, they vividly express the 1990’s political slogan “Think globally, act locally.”
That is, county government today is often the mechanism by which geographically or socially pervasive challenges are met with strategies that are locally initiated and accountable.
County governments have a long, long history. For most of that history, the scope of their authority ebbed and flowed between autonomous local entities and administrative local functionaries of the state.
That ebbing and flowing more or less subsided after 1868 when the “Dillon Rule” was established.
In his landmark 1868 decision for Merriam v. Moody’s Executors, Iowa Supreme Court Justice John F. Dillon ruled that local governments (“municipal corporations”) were limited in their powers to only those granted expressly to them by their state.
Dillon said that local governments have only these three types of power:
Those expressly granted to them by the state legislature
Powers necessary and incident to the execution of the express powers; and
Powers absolutely necessary to the discharge of the express powers–as Dillon put it, “not simply convenient, but indispensable.”
You can read the entire essay by clicking here: