When Lancaster County was established on May 10, 1729, it became the prototype for the sixty-three counties to follow. The original three counties, Philadelphia, Bucks and Chester, were created as copies of typical English shires. The frontier conditions of Chester County's backwoods, from which Lancaster was formed, presented knotty problems to the civilized Englishmen. Lancaster County, therefore, was an experiment in pragmatism erected on the periphery of Penn's "Holy Experiment". Pennsylvania's "first western county" would test the genius of English government and political common sense. Not only did the pragmatic experiment succeed, but it has continued to color the life and government of Lancastrians during the last 250 years.