I just want to say that “the Honorable Skeet Lee Jones” (the County Judge* of Loving County) is a classically Texas name. 
*- in Texas, a County Judge is among the highest-ranking officials in a county, and acts as the county’s chief executive.
This may be a question for another thread, but I am curious about that as well. Some counties, it seems, are no longer viable as entities due to population loss (the example of Loving County, TX posted above) - could they simply merge with a neighboring county if residents from both agree? Has that ever happened? I know over time new counties are formed by carving them out of existing counties, altho that probably has not happened in a long time (when was the last time a new county was formed in the US - a great trivia question!).
Broomfield CO, 2001.
But I suspect there have been “county-equivalent” cities established since then.
Yes. Skagway AK (2007) and Wrangell AK (2008) are consolidated city-boroughs. As geography nerds know, borough is the county equivalent in Alaska.
Before the 1960s, a lot of states allocated seats in the state legislature by county, so county borders were effectively gerrymanders in favor of rural populations. The U.S. Supreme Court ended this practice when it mandated one-person, one-vote standards.
As noted in the original 2005 part of the thread, counties were originally designed to be compact enough to allow residents to travel to the county seat in one day or less, allowing them to conduct their business there with the least amount of disruption at home.
Brewster County, Texas, with fewer than 10,000 residents, would seem ripe to be merged into another county, but Brewster County is already 6,193 square miles. Combining it with its next-door neighbor, Pecos County, would give you an entity that measures over 10,900 square miles (bigger than nine U.S. states) and still have fewer than 25,000 people. With numbers like that, there are simply no economies of scale to be realized.
I recall the whole “travel to the county seat” thing as well, but back in those days it was on horseback. Nowadays once can traverse an entire county in about 45 minutes on an interstate - even the big ones, in an hour or two.
San Bernardino County, CA, also mentioned upthread, is 2X the size of your example Brewster-Pecos county, but has a lot more people in it, altho, nearly all of them in the southwest corner of the county, with the vast rest of the county being open and town-less Mojave desert.
Anyway, I think the Texas counties came into being at a time when their size made some sense, but nowadays it’s hard to justify such a small postage-stamp array of counties. But, inertia is a thing, and Texas gets to hold onto the claim of having the most counties of any state, so that’s gotta count for something.
Another issue is that counties are often named after someone, and their descendants are likely to be fiercely opposed to any dissolution of grandpappy’s legacy. Also, small groups of people who benefit from the situation economically can exert a lot of pressure. In both these cases, its a small group but much more motivated than the opposition.
Yes, though IIRC this hasn’t happened in over a century.
Counties have no status in the U.S. constitution, so it is entirely up to state governments, laws, and constitutions to determine when and how they can be created, changed, or eliminated.
Such changes used to happen quite regularly during periods in which white settlement was increasing throughout states. They could still happen now.
However, think of all the people who have entrenched interests—political, economic, infrastructural, sentimental—in preserving current borders. You would have to assemble overwhelming political capital to change even one border, not to mention the entire county system of a state.
So, if it happens, it would happen quite rarely. Connecticut essentially abolished its counties in all but name in 1960, and that was a state whose county governments had relatively few important functions at all.
15 years ago I drove to Loving County for the sole purpose of visiting what was (purportedly) the least populous county in the lower 48. And by “drove to,” I mean specifically that I drove there and drove back, for no other reason. From Virginia. I was on leave from the Navy. In retrospect, I should have just kept on going, because my ship was undergoing mid-voyage repairs in San Diego, en route Japan (from Virginia). All driving back to Virginia did for me was cause me to have to fly to San Diego, then spend two months still in the US, but without a car.
Picture # 5 looks like home to me.
Iowa out-does Texas in the relative number of small counties. The average size of a Texan county is 1057 square miles. Whereas Iowa, which is much smaller but with 99 counties, has an average county size of 564 square miles.