What's the matter with Georgia?

November 11, 2008 3:13 PM

Even after living 2+ years in Georgia (the state, not the country) I find it strange that most people answer the question "Where are you from" with their home county. Coming from the west coast, it seems weird to refer to anything but hometown or general region (so. cal, bay area, etc..) I know GA has like 150 counties (the second most of any state, after Texas), so counties aren't that big. Is this just a Georgia thing? Southern thing? Descendents of convicts thing? What?
posted by El_Marto to society & culture (27 comments total)

I'm not from the south, but if you're from the country, or a very small town - it can be easier to just give your county. I also know that at least in some parts of the south, there can be a lot of different local laws per county (especially for booze) - and that may encourage the distinction. (we never did it in Michigan)
posted by The Light Fantastic at 3:17 PM on November 11, 2008

Is this coming from Atlanta area people primarily? My best guess would be that because the Greater Atlanta area is over multiple counties (Fulton, Gwinett and Cobb, right?), it's just a more specific frame of reference.
posted by hominid211 at 3:22 PM on November 11, 2008

I'm from North Carolina. Only those who are from rural towns that you have probably never heard of state their county as their residence. I have never lived in rural North Carolina, and have therefore never said I'm from a county.
posted by greta simone at 3:23 PM on November 11, 2008

You get that sort of thing in Maine, especially with Hancock, Washington, and Aroostook counties.

It's a rural thing.
posted by dunkadunc at 3:28 PM on November 11, 2008

It's a rural thing. I asked several rural people in KY where they were from and got counties as the answers.
posted by PatoPata at 3:42 PM on November 11, 2008

People from rural areas of the UK and Ireland are also likely to give their county as their home if they are from some small village that is not near any place you are likely to have heard of.
posted by grouse at 3:48 PM on November 11, 2008

in central ohio, you're either from Columbus (or one of the inner belt suburban cities) or you're from a county surrounding Columbus, and those is rural folk
posted by Salvatorparadise at 3:51 PM on November 11, 2008

It's not just a rural thing, at least not in Georgia. I hear the home county identification most often for Gwinnett County. I guess the answer could be different depending on the county (like a combination of the "rural" vote with hominid211's answer)
posted by El_Marto at 3:55 PM on November 11, 2008

I went to school in Virginia, and lots of people claimed counties there too. And quite a few of those people were from Northern Virginia/DC suburbs, so it's not just a rural thing. DC suburbanites from Maryland also referenced their home counties instead of specific towns (I've noticed they also do this on the Wire when referring to places outside of Baltimore).

Counties were also frequently referenced as areas in the local media at school-- I knew a lot more about the counties surrounding Charlottesville (Orange, Madison, etc.) than the actual little towns within them. I think a lot of the difference for someone coming from the West Coast, like you or me, is that instead of having large cities with not much between them and most counties having some sort of large population center in them, the East Coast is pretty well consistently populated in its rural areas so that there's not the large stretches of nothing like there are between say, San Diego and Phoenix. But even out here, referring to counties happens -- I've heard tons of people say they're from Orange County, as well as Marin, Humboldt, and Ventura.
posted by LionIndex at 4:03 PM on November 11, 2008

Yeah, I think it's more common than one might think, and that the explanation varies from place to place--suburbs, rural areas, regions within large cities/metro areas, etc. (like w/Baltimore County, as seen on The Wire, Johnson County, Kansas, as read in that Thomas Frank book, and Suffolk County, Long Island, as heard in R.A. the Rugged Man songs).
posted by box at 4:19 PM on November 11, 2008

...it's actually a pretty decent way of identifying where one is from, don't you think? Gives basic geographical location... for major metros it provides a decent directional indicator, for more rural areas it keeps you from looking like you assume your listener knows every hamlet, town, and map-dot in the state...

I guess the question should be "What's wrong with everyone else?"
posted by toomuchpete at 4:19 PM on November 11, 2008 [1 favorite has favorites]

I'm from rural Australia, our equivalent of a county is too big to be useful to identify where I'm from, it takes in too many towns. But i've always been frustrated at having to say the town i'm from, because i'm not from the town, i'm from a farm twenty miles out of town. If i had the choice of saying a county name i'd go with that too.
posted by compound eye at 4:30 PM on November 11, 2008

I went to school in Virginia, and lots of people claimed counties there too. And quite a few of those people were from Northern Virginia/DC suburbs, so it's not just a rural thing. DC suburbanites from Maryland also referenced their home counties instead of specific towns (I've noticed they also do this on the Wire when referring to places outside of Baltimore).

Virginia's cities and counties are somewhat of a special case, since unlike, say, Los Angeles County or Montgomery County (MD) or Dallas County (TX), a city is legally independent from any county. Counties themselves can contain only independent towns, which are relatively few in number compared to other states; there are also no civil townships as in New England or Pennsylvania. School divisions are also contiguous with a single county or city, and there are few multi-jurisdictional planning districts or authorities. These factors tend to strengthen the idea of the county (or independent city) being the strongest local unitary authority in citizens' minds. It's been this way for over 100 years, and as a native Virginian it seems quite natural to me to refer to myself as being from "XXX County" rather than from a small, unincorporated town within said county.

Also, as the OP mentioned, Georgia has 159 counties, while California has 58, even though California is many times Georgia's size. So I can see where it might be much easier to refer to either a very large area (So. Cal or "Atlanta") or a very specific one (Palm Springs or Clarke County) when discussing where one is from. However, I am not very familiar with Georgia political subdivisions, so I could be wrong.
posted by armage at 5:17 PM on November 11, 2008

Here in NYC, I hear people refer to being from Suffolk, Nassau, or Westchester County all the time.
posted by yeti at 5:34 PM on November 11, 2008

Data point: in Connecticut, I never heard anyone say their county. Counties in Connecticut have very little to do with daily life. Schools and police departments are usually organized at the town level.
posted by zippy at 6:08 PM on November 11, 2008

In NY, I also hear people talk about Westchester, though instead of saying either Nassau of Suffolk, they will often group the counties together and just say Long Island. (I'm in Central Nassau, about 12 miles of suburban sprawl from the NYC border, FWIW.)
posted by Brian Puccio at 6:45 PM on November 11, 2008

When people from New Jersey ask me where in Jersey I grew up, I always give my county first, as nobody has ever heard of the town. About half have any vague idea of where my county is (as counties outside yours and the ones directly touching yours are generally never considered). I'll then resort to nearby towns, and failing that, the nearest interstate.
posted by jalexei at 7:41 PM on November 11, 2008

I hear people talk about where they come from (or their families come from) by county in Texas outside urban areas, particularly in east and central Texas.
posted by immlass at 8:03 PM on November 11, 2008

It's mainly an eastern thing, where the counties are smaller. I was born in Georgia, and have spent some time there. The reason counties are so convenient for questions like that is because they're all "just the right size". Cities are often too tiny to be notable, or too large to be helpful. If you asked someone where they were from, and they said Atlanta, you wouldn't know much. Then again, if you asked someone and they said Powder Springs, you probably would know even less.
posted by Precision at 8:58 PM on November 11, 2008

Forgive me, but I can't pass this up: It's the Dukes of Hazzard, not the Dukes of Georgia!

Just sayin' ...
posted by skybolt at 10:20 PM on November 11, 2008

Mr. Adams is from Georgia, and he and his family always refer to places around home by the county rather than the city or town name.
posted by Oriole Adams at 2:20 AM on November 12, 2008

I live in a small town on the edge of a big city, just over the county line from the big city and its suburbs. Nobody in the city/suburbs would know where I live from the name of the town, so I tell them, "I live in (x) county." One reason may be that the public schools here are organized on a county level.
posted by Daily Alice at 2:53 AM on November 12, 2008

Oops, forgot to mention this is in North Carolina. I grew up in rural New Hampshire, where nobody ever talked about counties.
posted by Daily Alice at 2:54 AM on November 12, 2008

I was born and raised in Clayton County, Georgia. I think that the answers above bring up a lot of good points, but a lot of it has to do with how local governments work in Georgia. Outside of Atlanta, most law enforcement, local government and educational systems are run on the county level. Most people deal with a county sheriff when it comes to the law and quite a few people (including my parents) live on unincorporated land. That means that they aren't quite within the limits of any town and instead fall directly under the jurisdiction of the county for legal and zoning matters.

Additionally, this is reinforced by the news ("A Fayette County woman...") and the fact that up until Atlanta started growing like gangbusters most of the suburban counties each had only one high school and almost all were named after the county school system.
posted by Alison at 4:02 AM on November 12, 2008

Georgia / Atlanta Area native here (I know, dying breed). Do you listen to the news in the morning for traffic? Or (I know, it's awful) do you look at the AJC? The way the media typically talk about the metro area is in county-parlance. "In Gwinnett this morning, there's a mattress in the middle lane of 85 south at Sugarloaf," or whatever. Partially I think it's to do with what Alison is saying, and it's also to do with the fact that there are 159 counties. Geographically speaking, if you say you live in East Cobb, you know where that is. Marietta could mean kind of anywhere at all in east-central Cobb County, but East Cobb is where the money is and you can go slum it in the nicer parts of North Fulton (ie, Roswell) for the art galleries or whatever.
posted by Medieval Maven at 5:53 AM on November 12, 2008

Whenever anyone asks where I used to live in Georgia, I say "East Cobb County" - I've never used a county as a reference for any other area of the country I've lived in. Georgia is the only area I've ever known it to be common to reference county - I don't notice it as common at all in DC/MD/NoVA.
posted by KAS at 10:52 AM on November 12, 2008

I have been in Georgia my whole life. In more rural Georgia we didn't use the county parlance, probably because we mostly stuck to our little county. Here in the metro we have a whole lot of unincorporated land still and like MM points out, the media uses these terms almost exclusively, so you do here it more often. I have never actually heard an individual say it though.
posted by stormygrey at 1:51 PM on November 12, 2008