List of counties in Connecticut
There are eight counties in the U.S. state of Connecticut. Four of the counties – Fairfield, Hartford, New Haven and New London – were created in 1666, shortly after the Connecticut Colony and the New Haven Colony combined. Windham and Litchfield Counties were created later in the colonial era, while Middlesex and Tolland Counties were created after American independence (both in 1785). Six of the counties are named for locations in England, where many early Connecticut settlers originated; Fairfield County was named after the salt marshes that bordered the coast, while New Haven County was named for  the New Haven Colony. Although Connecticut is divided into counties, there is are no county-level governments, and local government in Connecticut exists solely on the municipality level. Almost all functions of county government were abolished in Connecticut in 1960, except for elected county sheriffs and their departments under them. Those offices and their departments were abolished by an act of the state legislature effective in December 2000. The functions the county sheriffs' departments played were assumed by the newly organized State Marshal Commission and the state Department of Corrections. Connecticut's legacy county names remain for geographical and statistical  purposes. Counties serve mainly as dividing lines for the state's judicial and state marshal system. However, the three largest counties–Fairfield, Hartford and New Haven–have been further subdivided into several smaller jurisdictions. In 2019 the state recommended to the United States Census Bureau that the nine Councils of Governments replace counties for statistical purposes, and the Census intends to implement it in 2023.