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Hutchinson County - The seat is apparently Olivet, which is a town of around 74 people, so small it doesn't seem to have a CD page. The largest town is Parkston at around 1,400.
Lawrence County - Apparently Deadwood is the county seat, but Spearfish is much larger. Odd situation in that I think Deadwood is more famous than Spearfish due to Westerns.
I might do more later. Wikipedia no longer does lists of county seats or lists of "smallest county seats" so that put a crimp in my plan for this post.
Also I read that in Indiana Vernon is the smallest county seat. The largest town in Vernon's county? (Jennings County) North Vernon, which is literally just north of Vernon but like twenty times as big.
I was originally gonna mention Cape Girardeau in Missouri(and where Jackson is actually the county seat), but I see someone beat me to it. Ah well, I'll stick to IL counties.
In DeKalb County, Illinois, DeKalb is the largest community(43,862), more than double the size of county seat Sycamore(17,519).
Other examples in IL:
DuPage County: Naperville(141,853)/Wheaton(55,416)
Jackson County: Carbondale(25,902)/Murphysboro(7,970)
Marion County: Centralia(13,032)/Salem(7,485)
Madison County: Alton(27,865)/Edwardsville(24,293)
McHenry County: Crystal Lake(42,142)/Woodstock(24,770)
Perry County: Du Quoin(**6,448)/Pinckneyville(**5,464)
Whiteside County: Sterling(15,370)/Morrison(4,307)
And finally not to forget a historical note: in Saint Clair County, East Saint Louis(82,366 back in 1950) was once bigger than Belleville(41,223 in 1970, per City Data). Darn the Census website that somehow, I couldn't find 1950 population data for Belleville....
Note: all population figures mentioned in this post are based on the 2010 Census, unless otherwise noted. And if I didn't mention one or 2 Illinois counties where a non-county seat community is bigger than the county seat, my apologies, and please don't take it as a slight against your Illinois community. I only have limited time, and these are the examples I came up with. Was time-consuming enough to find the population for each of them, just to be sure I was right about this being the case....
*- unable to find 2010 data, so the data is 2000 Census data.
I wonder what the largest city in the United States is that's not a county seat. Arlington, TX maybe?
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IL examples
