I used to live in Sommerville, but I guess I never paid attention. How the *&# can Norfolk county be in three non adjacent parts?
Ok, so Brookline wanted to secede from Boston (whenever that happened) but why did it become part of Norfolk County rather than Suffolk? And what about that other party that’s right in the middle of Plymouth County?
Are there any other counties that are cut in two by other counties? No fair counting islands or something. I’m talking about counties that are set up such that, you can walk over land from one part to another, BUT, you must pass through another county of the same state to get there. So the Upper Penninsula and Lower Penninsula of Michigan don’t count either.
Well they used to matter. The elimination of real county governments in Massachussets is a fairly recent thing, and the oddities surrounding Norfolk predate it. I don’t know any of the history, though.
These things are fairly common. There are two parts of Geneva canton (Switzerland) that are enclosed in the neighbouring canton of Vaud.
On an international scale, there are several parts of the Netherlands enclosed within Belgium, and unless I’m misstaken also the other way around. (And even though we’re mainly talking small enclaves here, there are also some largish towns, who don’t ‘belong’ to the surrounding country.)
Here is a text on the enclaves on the Nl/Be border. Fascinating subject! There are even Dutch enclaves within the Belgian enclave within the Dutch territory.
Part of Oman (the tip of the Musandam Peninsula on the Strait of Hormuz) is detached from the rest of the country, with the United Arab Emirates intervening in the space between. This is easier to understand when you look at national territory as originally having been the personal demesne of a feudal ruler like the Sultan. The territorial history of Oman is quite complex, in fact. The older name for the country, up until the coup d’état in 1970, was “Muscat and Oman.” Because it actually was two countries in one, in a sense. The coast was ruled by the Sultan of Muscat (the national capital city). The interior upland (the “Oman” part) was under the sway of the Imam of the Ibadiyah, a religious sect. Until 1970 Muscat and Oman really was still a medieval-style feudal demesne. The present ruler, Sultan Qaboos, changed all that and made it into a modern nation-state. He took away the political authority of the Imam and unified the country into a single entity. The southern province of Dhofar had been not a part of the country but the personal estate of the Sultan. So was Zanzibar in the 19th century. In fact, the Sultans back then preferred to reside in Zanzibar rather than Oman itself. (How do I know all this? I was once employed in a project of boundary litigation in the Arabian Peninsula and had to read huge amounts of literature on this kind of thing.)
Llivia is a Spanish village in the Pyrenees that is completely surrounded by French territory.
Back during the Cold War, West Berlin had teeny bits of territory outside the Berlin Wall, surrounded by East German territory. I don’t know how the hell they ever managed that situation. Some of the bits were as small as single buildings.
The United States even has a bit of territory that is separated from the main contiguous body. This American exclave is known as “Alaska.”
Towns chose to join various other counties and/or Boston annexed its adjacent towns (Roxbury, Dorchester) in the 1890s (mostly); the towns then joined Suffolk County, isolating Brookline.
The ‘newest’ town in MA is Plainfield, est. 1931. Boston didn’t officially become a city until 1822, after nearly 200 years of European settlement.
I worked in government up there for a while–aside from the court systems, counties don’t matter at all, and many people have no idea what county they happen to live in. Nantucket is its own county! And Martha’s Vineyard and a bit of Cape Cod make up another county (Dukes). And Hampden and Hampshire are right next to each other! And check out the Southwick Jog…
A friend from Newton once told me it used to be in Norfolk County, but moved to Middlesex for reasons that must have seemed good at the time. That separated Brookline from the rest of Norfolk County. I believe West Roxbury and a few other Boston neighborhoods that used to be separate were in Norfolk prior to being annexed by Boston.
I’d assume something similar made Hingham decide it would rather be in Plymouth County, cutting off Cohasset. FTR, the Norfolk/Plymouth-Bristol line, one of the few straight ones in the state, was the original boundary between the Plymouth Colony and the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Yes, it is pronounced the way it’s spelled, though the sex part sometimes sounds like sucks. I don’t know if people snicker or not though. Don’t remember really.
As a Norfolk (pronounced Norfork) County native I never, ever knew that. Huh.
Yes, St. Martin and West Feliciana parishes in Louisiana consist of discontinuous enclaves. There are some ambiguous situations along river boundaries, where rivers change course and leave detached portions of states (and therefore, of necessity, of counties) on the opposite shore. Also, there’s that little loop in western Kentucky. But I’m pretty sure that Louisiana is the only clear-cut case like Massachusetts–where a county (or “county-equivalent”) lies within the interior of a state but is broken in two.
Hmm, whoever founded Massachusetts (or named its counties, at any rate) wasn’t being too original.
Looking at that map, most of those counties are named after English counties: Hampshire (my home county), Berkshire, Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, Suffolk… and most of the rest are named after English towns: Worcester, Bristol, Plymouth, and Barnstable (actually the English town is Barnstaple).
Oh, yes, you’ll find that naming tradition everywhere in New England – I guess that’s why the call it “new England”. Even many apparent exceptions are named after other places (e.g. Berlin, Ma or Jacob’s Pillow). A friend of mine once wrote a hilarious essay decrying the local practice of drowning or otherwise destroying nonconforming towns (It was his thesis that the towns submerged under the Quabbin reservoir and other manmade bodies of water, or obliterated to create Ft. Devens (now closed) had disproportionately non-English names. I have no idea if it was factually accurate, but it sure was funny.
Sorry, KP, the drowned towns were Dana, Prescott, Enfield, and Greenwich. Sound pretty Anglo to me. And many of the place names are pronounced and spelled Brit-style–Worcester is Woostuh, Leicester is Lester, etc.
