The Smallest County?

I’ve covered several elections here in Sanford/Lee County and we’re in the middle of another one. One thing I hear almost every election cycle is that Lee is “the smallest county in the state” and it certainly seems that way.

You can drive from Moncure (just north of the Lee-Chatham county line) to Cameron (just south of the Lee-Moore county line) in less than 30 minutes. Likewise, a trip from Mamers (just east of the Lee-Harnett county line) to Gulf (just northwest of the other Lee-Chatham county line) takes about the same amount of time.

And population-wise, Lee County has historically been pretty small. Sanford kind of represents small-town America to me, and Broadway residents don’t refer to their own town as Mayberry for no reason. So hearing that Lee is the smallest county in the state over and over again, not just from candidates but from every day people, makes it easy to believe.

Before moving to Sanford at 16, I lived in Kure Beach, at the southernmost tip of New Hanover County. New Hanover County is another place where I constantly heard the “smallest county in the state” mantra. Despite the wildly bigger population there, it seems like a pretty small county as well, so I’ve always wondered which one really was the smallest.

Today, at a forum for candidates seeking a seat on the Lee County Board of Commissioners, one of the office-seekers (who I’m not going to name, as I’m not out to embarrass anyone) repeated the line that Lee County is the state’s smallest. It got me to thinking that information like that is pretty easy to come by, so I looked it all up, by both population and square mileage, since a reasonable argument can be made that either of those measures has its own bearing on how “big” a place is.

And while the population numbers came from the 2000 Census and have likely changed in huge ways, they’ll have to do for now since I have no way of knowing how growth has happened in individual parts of the state.

So what did I find? Is Lee County the state’s smallest?

Not by a long shot.

At 259 square miles, Lee County is bigger than Clay County (221 square miles), Allegheny County (236 square miles), Avery County (247 square miles), Chowan County (233 square miles), Mitchell County (222 square miles), and Polk County (239 square miles).

Incidentally, however, the New Hanoverians I knew who claimed to be in the state’s smallest county were way off, as the home to Wilmington is 328 square miles across, practically dwarfing Lee and all of the other counties I just mentioned.

Going by population was even more interesting, as Lee County seems to be pretty much in the middle of the pack. The 2000 Census listed Lee County at 49,040 residents, and I know we’re bigger than that. Counties with fewer people than us in 2000 are as follows (get ready): Alexander, Allegheny, Anson, Ashe, Avery, Beaufort, Bertie, Camden, Caswell, Cherokee, Chowan, Clay, Currituck, Dare, Franklin, Gates, Graham, Granville, Greene, Hertford, Hoke, Hyde, Jackson, Jones, McDowell, Macon, Madison, Martin, Mitchell, Montgomery, Northhampton, Pamlico, Pasquotank, Pender, Perquimans, Person, Polk, Richmond, Scotland, Stokes, Swain, Transylvania, Tyrrell, Vance, Warren, Washington, Watauga, Yadkin, and Yancey.

As I said before, some of those may have grown faster than we did (Pender County, next to New Hanover, seems like a huge growth area, for example), but I have a hard time believing that the 10,667 people who were in Allegheny County in 2000 have swelled to better than 50,000 in the past eight years.

The county that seemed the most like Lee in terms of both population and size was Davie County, just west of the Winston-Salem metro area. Davie County is a little bigger than us at 267 square miles and in 2000 had virtually the same population we did at 49,063. I don’t know what that says about us or them, but it was cool to find two places in separate parts of the state that share such important defining characteristics.

Anyway, my point is that it isn’t that hard to find these things out, so we ought to put a rest to that idea that we’re smaller than everyone else and that it possibly puts us at some type of disadvantage. Instead, we should be talking about how much more we’re like most other mildly-populated places in North Carolina and what we’re doing better or worse than those places.

I couldn’t find a map of North Carolina’s counties that was small enough to fit into this blog space, but if you want to look at one, click here.