Why does louisiana have parishes and counties

Settlers were too few, and the terrain too vast or inaccessible, to necessitate precise delineation, and because colonials answered to an unelected monarchy, there was no need to draw up voting precincts or electoral districts. Instead, people regionalized the colony based loosely on settlement cores and peripheries and the waterways among them. Orthography, it should be noted, was as fluid as geography in this era. The Catholic Church had different spatial exigencies, as clergy tended to their flock on a regular and more personal basis.

Houses of worship had to be built; masses were celebrated weekly if not daily; sacraments were administered, children educated, tithes collected, and cemeteries maintained. All of these services required a more congealed sense of community geography, based around church buildings—although here too, ecclesiastic borders tended to be loosely drawn.

In French, these units were called paroisses ; in Spanish parroquias ; and in English, parishes ; and there were twenty-one such units throughout the Louisiana colony by the late s.

Because of the predomination of the Catholic Church, ecclesiastic parishes gained credibility and expediency as a way to organize Louisiana human geography. This would eventually prove useful to government. After the Louisiana Purchase, representatives of the United States installed the apparatus of government they had honed elsewhere, and jurisdictional divisions topped the list of American administrative tools. Charles…, of St. Bernard and St. The Territory of Orleans was divided into 12 countries that used the same names and practically the same boundaries as the former colonial parishes.

By the territorial legislature created 19 parishes without technically abolishing the counties. At the constitutional convention of the state, it was decided that Louisiana should be divided into seven judicial districts, each being made up of groups of parishes. In the Territory of Orleans had grown enough to achieve statehood, becoming the state of Louisiana.

It was not until the Louisiana Constitution that the term parishes officially replaced counties as the official term for the state's major civil divisions.

Louisiana is the only state in America whose political subdivisions are parishes and not counties. The state is divided into 64 parishes. Parishes are one of the several elements of the political and legal structure from that time that Louisiana has kept the civil law legal system is another example.

A parish is by definition a small administrative district typically having its own church and priest, which naturally grew out of Louisiana's heavily Roman Catholic influenced past. There are 64 parishes, but they didn't spring into existence all at once when Louisiana joined the Union. The last three -- Allen, Beauregard and Jefferson Davis parishes -- were created in from parts of Calcasieu Parish, following close on the heels of Evangeline Parish, which had been part of St.

The fact that Louisiana has parishes instead of counties is yet another way in which the state is distinctive. It's something the state's residents accept as a normal part of life, like red beans and rice on Mondays and chicory in coffee, and they probably don't bother to think about it until someone from out of town asks where the counties are, providing an opportunity for a discussion of the state's deep, rich history.

Correction : In an earlier version of this story, the year given for the publication of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's poem "Evangeline" was incorrect. It was published in