Why Does Louisiana Have Parishes Instead of Counties?

Of the 50 states that make up the United States, Louisiana is the only one that designates each of its largest local administrative districts as a “parish.” Of the other states, 48 use the term county and Alaska uses the term borough. Why does Louisiana use parish?

The answer lies in the state’s early history—in particular, its historical relationship to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1682–1762 the immense region then called Louisiana was held by France as part of its North American possession, New France. At the close of this period, France ceded colonial Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, as well as New Orleans, to Spain, which held the region until 1800 and then ceded it back to France. Three years later the Louisiana Purchase was concluded, transferring the region to the United States.

Under the French, colonial Louisiana’s religious life had been controlled by a single Quebec-based Catholic diocese. Both France and Spain were Catholic countries, and the church played a major role in administering their territories. The church required a large infrastructure centered on buildings and congregations, and, for that purpose, by the late 18th century it had set up parishes (French paroisses, Spanish parroquias) as administrative units in colonial Louisiana.

This meant that, when part of the region joined the United States as the state of Louisiana in 1812, it already had an organized system of administrative units—25 parishes in all. Yet, the immediate result of Louisiana’s statehood was a historical detour. The term parish for an administrative unit had been officially adopted in 1807 by the territorial legislature. A few years later, however, the new state’s legislature, deploying the system already used in the rest of the U.S., divided Louisiana into 12 counties. The 1812 state constitution confirmed this division. Consequently, for a few decades both the terms parish and county were used. But this system contained an ambiguity: In Louisiana, “counties” were merely electoral and judicial districts, and hence they lacked the local administrative machinery that had been established in the counties of other states. Moreover, Louisiana’s existing francophone Catholic population tended to view the creation of counties in their state as a power play to favor incoming Anglo-Americans. As a result, the use of such units was deemed a potential catalyst for political instability.

It took a few decades to work out a solution to these issues. Use of the term parish persisted in the more Catholic parts of the state, irrespective of official designations. And eventually, when a new state constitution was ratified in 1845, counties were effectively abolished. The final version of the document contained no mention of counties but about a hundred mentions of parishes. This stabilized the terminology, and Louisiana has had parishes instead of counties ever since—at present a total of 64 of them.