county seats that never had a state highway

[NE2]

(Yes, a federal highway counts as a state highway, being state maintained and all.)
Conejos, CO (looks like it may have been served by SH 17 until 1926, but doesn't appear to have had one since then)
Kalawao County, HI
Edgartown, MA and Nantucket, MA (have state-maintained highways but nothing numbered)
Any others?

[Molandfreak]

North Slope, Northwest Arctic, Aleutians East, Bristol Bay, Lake and Peninsula, Kodiak Island, Yakutat, Skagway, Sitka, Wrangell, (others?) boroughs in Alaska. I didn't include any unorganized.

[Alps]

Belvidere, NJ

[NE2]

Belvidere, NJ

SR 1004 goes up to the city limits
But yeah, I'd count it.

[oscar]

North Slope, Northwest Arctic, Aleutians East, Bristol Bay, Lake and Peninsula, Kodiak Island, Yakutat, Skagway, Sitka, Wrangell, (others?) boroughs in Alaska. I didn't include any unorganized.

Skagway has AK 98.  Ketchikan Gateway, Juneau, Petersburg (newly-established borough), and Haines all have segments of AK 7 serving their borough seats.

North Slope is served by AK 11, but that highway is hundreds of miles from the borough seat of Barrow, which also has no other numbered state highway access (it has unnumbered state-maintained roads -- Alaska DOT maintains roads in even the most isolated communities, they just aren't assigned route numbers, only six-digit internal inventory numbers).  The borough seats of Aleutians East, Kodiak, Yakutat, Sitka, and Wrangell boroughs have only Alaska Marine Highway System ferry service, in addition to unnumbered state-maintained local roads.  Northwest Arctic and Bristol Bay boroughs have no state highway access of any kind, except unnumbered state-maintained local roads.  Lake and Peninsula borough has occasional AMHS ferry service (at Chignik), but its borough seat is in Bristol Bay borough, and has no state highway access of any kind except unnumbered state-maintained local roads.

Of the census areas, Prince of Wales-Hyder, Dillingham, Bethel, Wade Hampton, and Nome have no state highway access of any kind except unnumbered state-maintained local roads, and Hoonah-Angoon and Aleutians West have only AMHS ferry service and unnumbered state-maintained local roads.  Valdez-Cordova has AK 4 and AK 10; Southeast Fairbanks has AK 1, AK 2, AK 4, and AK 5; Yukon-Koyukuk has AK 2, AK 3, AK 6, and AK 11 (but no obvious "seat" for that census area, and if there were it might not be on either highway).

[TCN7JM]

Fort Yates, North Dakota, has no state highway running to it now, and I don't think it ever has.

[bassoon1986]

Pointe a la Hache, LA really isn't a town or village of any sort anymore with limits, but LA 39 serves it. Otherwise that'd be the closest match for a Louisiana seat.

[dfilpus]

Friday Harbor, San Juan County, WA, has never had a state numbered highway. However, officially, the Washington State Ferry routes are designated as an unsigned segment of WA 20 Spur.

[empirestate]

Closest you get for New York would be St. George (Richmond County), but it used to have NY 439 so no go.

[NE2]

Fort Yates, North Dakota, has no state highway running to it now, and I don't think it ever has.

http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~33754~1171470:Rand-McNally-junior-auto-road-map-N appears to show ND 37 passing through (leaving to the south on Standing Rock Avenue), but it could be full of it.

[dgolub]

Closest you get for New York would be St. George (Richmond County), but it used to have NY 439 so no go.

But does that count with all state routes in NYC other than expressways or parkways being locally maintained?  It had a state route number, but the state never owned it.

[Urban Prairie Schooner]

Pointe a la Hache, LA really isn't a town or village of any sort anymore with limits, but LA 39 serves it. Otherwise that'd be the closest match for a Louisiana seat.

That place is so remote and out of the way that it would be my first choice of shelter during a zombie apocalypse. 

More on topic, I don't think there's a single incorporated place in Louisiana that doesn't have a state highway pass through its limits.

[TCN7JM]

Fort Yates, North Dakota, has no state highway running to it now, and I don't think it ever has.

http://www.davidrumsey.com/luna/servlet/detail/RUMSEY~8~1~33754~1171470:Rand-McNally-junior-auto-road-map-N appears to show ND 37 passing through (leaving to the south on Standing Rock Avenue), but it could be full of it.

It might have been different in 1927, but the way the river is now, that isn't possible. A Citgo map I have from 1965 shows the highway skirting the western edge, but all official maps I have (a couple from the 70s, a few from the 80s, one from 1990), show it going clear west of the city like it does now.

[NE2]

The riverbank was different back then: http://research.archives.gov/description/5834690 (second page, last image; note that ND 24 did bypass Fort Yates then)

[Molandfreak]

Whoa. Is there another town surrounding Fort Yates? Why did the city never annex it's urban surrounding?

[NE2]

Whoa. Is there another town surrounding Fort Yates?

Sort of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_Rock

[getemngo]

More on topic, I don't think there's a single incorporated place in Louisiana that doesn't have a state highway pass through its limits.

If we made a topic on all incorporated places in the US without state highways, we'd be here all day... so I'm tempted to start one. 

Since we're using city/village limits as criteria here, it raises the question of how you'd count unincorporated county seats. Would the state highway have to go through the  business district or the "main" intersection?

[bassoon1986]

Louisiana has 2 unincorporated parish seats, Pointe a la Hache and Convent. I would say where the courthouse is. St. James Parish courthouse is right on LA 44 (Convent really doesn't have a conventional 4 way intersection or crossroads). Plaquemines Parish is an oddity. I don't think there is a working courthouse at all anymore in Pointe a la Hache, although the old one is on an old road facing the river, which may have been LA 39 at one point. I'm guessing the working courthouse these days is in Belle Chasse? Why the seat hasn't changed I'll never know...

[Urban Prairie Schooner]

Louisiana has 2 unincorporated parish seats, Pointe a la Hache and Convent. I would say where the courthouse is. St. James Parish courthouse is right on LA 44 (Convent really doesn't have a conventional 4 way intersection or crossroads). Plaquemines Parish is an oddity. I don't think there is a working courthouse at all anymore in Pointe a la Hache, although the old one is on an old road facing the river, which may have been LA 39 at one point. I'm guessing the working courthouse these days is in Belle Chasse? Why the seat hasn't changed I'll never know...

The old courthouse in Pointe a la Hache burned down in 2002 and has been sitting as a ruin ever since. (Katrina would have flooded/destroyed the structure in any case a few years later.) The seat of government has been temporarily located in Belle Chasse since that time. There have been a couple of proposals to move the parish seat to someplace more central on the west side of the river - I believe Port Sulphur and West Pointe a la Hache have been proposed as sites, but folks in lower Plaquemines and on the east bank have so far resisted any such moves.
(Not that there are too many folks left out there nowadays...) This article from 2010 gives some background:
http://www.nola.com/katrina/index.ssf/2010/08/plaquemines_parish_population.html

Though I agree the parish seat needs to move (definitely somewhere closer to Belle Chasse - maybe Myrtle Grove or Jesuit Bend?) I would hate to see the old courthouse entirely removed, as my great-grandmother was born in Pointe a la Hache around the time that old courthouse was brand spanking new (!).

Also, other unincorporated parish seats in Louisiana include Chalmette, Hahnville, Cameron, and Edgard.

[Alps]

Closest you get for New York would be St. George (Richmond County), but it used to have NY 439 so no go.

But does that count with all state routes in NYC other than expressways or parkways being locally maintained?  It had a state route number, but the state never owned it.

But at the point when this was St. George and not City of New York, there were no state highways anyway.

[NE2]

But at the point when this was St. George and not City of New York, there were no state highways anyway.

Yeah, the state started improving (and numbering for internal use) state highways less than a year after NYC consolidated. Only Queens County had one in the early days (SH 9104 to Rockaway Point, taken over in accordance with a special law).

[empirestate]

Closest you get for New York would be St. George (Richmond County), but it used to have NY 439 so no go.

But does that count with all state routes in NYC other than expressways or parkways being locally maintained?  It had a state route number, but the state never owned it.

But at the point when this was St. George and not City of New York, there were no state highways anyway.

It's still St. George, though, and still the county seat, it's just now a neighborhood of a borough of the city. So if non-state-owned touring routes don't count as "state highways", then yeah, we have a winner here.

[NE2]

It's still St. George, though, and still the county seat,

[citation needed]

When the seat of government is in an unincorporated community, the boundaries of the county seat are usually not well-defined. There doesn't seem to be any authority that defines county seats; it's simply the common term for where the county offices are located. So who's to say that St. George is the county seat, and not Staten Island, or NYC as a whole?

[empirestate]

It's still St. George, though, and still the county seat,

[citation needed]

New York State Gazetteer, published in 1995 by NYSDOT as a companion to its official state map, and reprinted in 1998 as part of its official state atlas.

When the seat of government is in an unincorporated community, the boundaries of the county seat are usually not well-defined. There doesn't seem to be any authority that defines county seats; it's simply the common term for where the county offices are located. So who's to say that St. George is the county seat, and not Staten Island, or NYC as a whole?

Who, indeed. Do you mean that you take a different location to be the Richmond County seat? Which? The courthouse is located in St. George, across from the ferry terminal, so that's definitely the seat, by as official a definition as there may or may not be. The seat is also in the borough of Staten Island, but since that's coextensive with the county, it's rather like saying that the county is its own seat, which is not helpful information for finding where the government offices might be located. The specific location of St. George is a better particularization of where the seat is.

[lordsutch]

Here's one for you: Kaskaskia, Illinois was the county seat of Randolph County, Illinois, until 1844, when it was moved to Chester (where it still is today). In 1881, flooding destroyed most of the town of Kaskaskia and (perhaps more interestingly) caused the diversion of the Mississippi River to a new channel, isolating the town from the rest of Illinois on the new west bank of the river. To this day, Kaskaskia is not served by an Illinois state highway. US 61 in Missouri comes within a few yards of the residual Kaskaskia Island (of which the remaining village is a small part) but never crosses into Illinois.