One of the more underutilized census geographies, in my opinion, are “county subdivisions”. I don’t think we ever tabulated and reported data for this particular geographic level in any of our work (at MTC, SF Bay Area MPO, my tenure there between 1981-2009).
More recently, I’ve been messing around with historical census data, including county subdivisions, focusing on California and Alameda County.
I live in what was formerly called “Eden Township” named after settlers who moved here from Mt Eden, Kentucky in the 1850s. The term “township” in California was used between the 1860 and 1950 Censuses, after which the Census Bureau switched to the “Census County Division” or “CCD” concept starting in 1960 in California and other states. (CCDs were first used in Washington State in the 1950 Census.)
So, my thought was “how many townships remain in the United States?”
A few months ago I started an R stat package analysis (tidycensus, dplyr) to find “places called Eden” and “places called Paradise” and “places called Cupcake”…… I extended this analysis to county subdivisions (COUSUB) and then subsetted county subdivisions with the word “township” in their name. Alas, there are no East Cupcakes in the United States!
The resulting tally of counties, place, county subdivisions, and townships by US state is included in links to files on my GitHub.
My r script to create this is shared, here:
3,221 counties in the United States (including Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia)
36,678 county subdivisions in the United States (incl PR + DC)
17,701 townships in the United States (incl PR+ DC)
31,909 places in the United States (incl PR + DC)
Most counties? Texas, with 254 counties.
Most county subdivisions? Minnesota, with 2,761 county subdivisions (COUSUB)
Most townships? Minnesota, with 1,802 townships.
Most places? Pennsylvania with 1,888 places.
How many states still have townships? Fifteen.
Hope this is of interest.
Chuck Purvis,
Hayward, California
Eden Township