Sullivan County Courthouse — Smallest County Seat in Pennsylvania

The courthouse in the center of Laporte holds two distinctions that make it quietly remarkable among Pennsylvania's sixty-seven county seats. Laporte is both the smallest and the highest county seat in the state. The borough itself has fewer than four hundred residents. The elevation is nearly two thousand feet above sea level, placing it atop the Endless Mountains in terrain that kept Sullivan County one of the most sparsely settled corners of Pennsylvania for most of its history.

The county itself was born of a political bargain. When Sullivan County was carved from Lycoming County in eighteen forty-seven, there was serious debate about where to place the seat of government. Dushore, a larger and more established settlement to the north, expected the honor. It did not receive it. Laporte, then barely a village, was selected instead, and Dushore's partisans spent years arguing the decision was a mistake. The rival town's name, incidentally, carries its own peculiar history: it derived from a French naval officer, Captain Aristide Aubert Dupetit-Thouars, whose name was anglicized into something approximating a small Pennsylvania borough.

The courthouse standing on the square today was built in eighteen ninety-four, designed by the firm of Wagner and Reitmeyer in the Romanesque Revival style then fashionable for civic buildings. The exterior is medium-range red brick, with cut stone accents around the arched windows and a commanding four-story bell tower that can be seen from the surrounding ridges. The five-bay entrance block features a large cross gable and round-arched windows that give the building a solidity well beyond what a county this small might ordinarily have commissioned.

The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-eight. On most weekday mornings the square is quiet, the courthouse doing its business for a county where the largest employer may well be the state forest itself. Sullivan County remains to this day one of the least densely populated counties east of the Mississippi River.