Three counties ( Greenbrier, Kanawha, and Randolph) have sufficient population (based on the 2020 United States Census) and land area to allow a new county to be split off. Creation of a new county is prohibited if it would bring another county below these thresholds. Article 9, Section 8, of the West Virginia Constitution permits the creation of additional counties if a majority of citizens in the proposed new county vote for its creation and the new county has a minimum area of 400 square miles (1,036 km 2) and a population of at least 6,000. The West Virginia Constitution was ratified in 1872, replacing the state constitution created in 1863 when West Virginia became a state. In March 1866, the United States Congress passed a joint mandate assenting to their inclusion in the new state, and the Supreme Court of the United States confirmed this outcome in the case of Virginia v. Five additional counties ( Grant, Mineral, Lincoln, Summers, and Mingo) were formed from the original counties in the decades following admission.Īfter the Civil War, Berkeley County and Jefferson County, the two easternmost counties of West Virginia, refused to recognize their inclusion in the state, and the Virginia General Assembly passed legislation attempting to reclaim them. West Virginia was admitted as a separate state of the United States on June 20, 1863. ![]() Fifty of them existed at the time of the Wheeling Convention in 1861, during the American Civil War, when those counties seceded from the Commonwealth of Virginia to form the new state of West Virginia.
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