Mount Olivet: Seat of Kentucky's Smallest County

Mount Olivet is the county seat of Robertson County, Kentucky's smallest county in both area and population. Robertson County covers about one hundred square miles and holds fewer than twenty-two hundred residents , numbers that have made it an outlier in Kentucky county government since it was carved out of portions of Bracken, Harrison, Mason, and Nicholas counties in eighteen sixty-seven. The county was named for George Robertson, a Kentucky congressman and chief justice of the state Court of Appeals.

Mount Olivet itself was founded around eighteen twenty and incorporated in eighteen fifty-one, becoming the county seat when Robertson County was organized as the one hundred eleventh county in Kentucky. With a population of about three hundred fifty, it is one of the smallest county seats in the entire United States. The rolling farmland around it is classic northeastern Kentucky , tobacco and cattle country, with creek-carved hollows and timber ridges. The courthouse square still functions as the center of a functioning, if very small, county government.