[Sidenote:  The county was the unit of representation.] The difference, however, between the New England township and the Virginia parish, in respect of self-government, was striking enough.  We have now to note a further difference.  In New England, as we have seen, the township was the unit of representation in the colonial legislature; but in Virginia the parish was not the unit of representation.  The county was that unit.  In the colonial legislature of Virginia the representatives sat not for parishes, but for counties.  The difference is very significant.  As the political life of New England was in a manner built up out of the political life of the towns, so the political life of Virginia was built up out of the political life of the counties.  This was partly because the vast plantations were not grouped about a compact village nucleus like the small farms at the North, and partly because there was not in Virginia that Puritan theory of the church according to which each congregation is a self-governing democracy.  The conditions which made the New England town-meeting were absent.  The only alternative was some kind of representative government, and for this the county was a small enough area.  The county in Virginia was much smaller than in Massachusetts or Connecticut.  In a few instances the county consisted of only a single parish; in some cases it was divided into two parishes, but oftener into three or more.

[Sidenote:  The county court was virtually a close corporation.] In Virginia, as in England and in New England, the county was an area for the administration of justice.  There were usually in each county eight justices of the peace, and their court was the counterpart of the Quarter Sessions in England.  They were appointed by the governor, but it was customary for them to nominate candidates for the governor to appoint, so that practically the court filled its own vacancies and was a close corporation, like the parish vestry.  Such an arrangement tended to keep the general supervision and control of things in the hands of a few families.

This county court usually met as often as once a month in some convenient spot answering to the shire town of England or New England.  More often than not the place originally consisted of the court-house and very little else, and was named accordingly from the name of the county, as Hanover Court House or Fairfax Court House; and the small shire towns that have grown up in such spots often retain these names to the present day.  Such names occur commonly in Virginia, West Virginia, and South Carolina, very rarely in Kentucky, North Carolina, Alabama, Ohio, and nowhere else in the United States.[9] Their number has diminished from the tendency to omit the phrase “Court House,” leaving the name of the county for that of the shire town, as for example in Culpeper, Va.  In New England the process of naming has been just the reverse; as in Hartford County, Conn., or Worcester County, Mass., which have taken their names from the shire towns.  In this, as in so many cases, whole chapters of history are wrapped up in geographical names.[10]