--- title: "Kalawao County, Hawaii, the smallest US county, has 82 residents, no elected government and one mule trail" url: https://badiyaa.com/kalawao-county-hawaii-smallest-us-county/ published: 2026-11-14T06:32:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-14T06:32:00+00:00 section: Offbeat publisher: Badiyaa --- # Kalawao County, Hawaii, the smallest US county, has 82 residents, no elected government and one mule trail Kalawao County, Hawaii, is the smallest US county by land, with 82 residents, no elected government and the state health director serving as mayor. The smallest county in the 50 US states has no county seat, no elected government and only 82 residents. Its mayor is whoever runs Hawaii’s health department. Its supplies arrive by barge once a year. And the only way in by land is a mule trail down a cliff more than a quarter of a mile high. Welcome to Kalawao County, Hawaii, a 12-square-mile sliver of land on the north coast of Molokaʻi that is officially a county and works like almost nothing else in America. ## A county walled off by cliffs Kalawao covers 53 square miles on paper, but 41 of those are ocean. That leaves about 12 square miles of land, mostly the flat Kalaupapa Peninsula, which formed when lava erupted near Kauhakō Crater and spread into a low shield volcano below the island’s towering sea cliffs. Those cliffs are the reason the county exists. From 1866 to 1969, the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi and every government that followed it sent people with Hansen’s disease, then called leprosy, to the peninsula and kept them there. The isolation that made it a place of exile still shapes daily life. The steep trail drops about 1,600 feet to the settlement and has been closed to visitors since a 2018 landslide. Most people now arrive by small plane at Kalaupapa Airport, which has scheduled flights to the rest of Molokaʻi and to Honolulu. Heavy freight comes once a year, usually in July. ## The mayor who is also the health director Kalawao has no local government of its own. Under Hawaii state law, the state’s Director of Health, appointed by the governor, also serves as the county’s mayor and appoints a county sheriff from among local residents. The only county rules that apply directly are health rules. The US Census Bureau calls it “an adjunct of the state government.” The quarantine was lifted only after antibiotics made the disease treatable at home. Many former patients chose to stay, and the state promised they could live there for life. In 1980 the federal government created Kalaupapa National Historical Park to protect the settlement’s history and landscape, and the National Park Service now runs audio tours built around the patients who lived there. Visitors aged 16 and over need prior permission or a place on an official tour. ## A shrinking county, by the numbers The census tells the story in one line. In 1900, 1,177 people lived in Kalawao County. By 1960 it was 279, by 2000 it was 147, and in 2020 it was 82. That is a drop of about 93% across 120 years. - **Land area:** about 12 square miles, the smallest of any true US county. - **Population:** 82 in 2020, second-smallest after Loving County, Texas. - **Households:** 59, living in 114 housing units, nearly half of them empty. - **Water share:** about 77% of the county’s total area is ocean. Even Kalawao’s smallest-county title comes with fine print. Some Virginia cities that sit outside any county cover less land and count as “county equivalents” for statistics, but they are not true counties. ## A county with an end date Kalawao is also the rare county with an official end date. A Hawaii law passed in 2026 says the county will cease to exist one year after the last full- or part-time patient resident of Kalaupapa dies, and its land will then fold into Maui County. At the time of passage, seven patients still lived there, four of them full-time, and the youngest was 83. For more places that sound made up, read about [Oymyakon, the coldest permanently inhabited village on Earth](https://badiyaa.com/oymyakon-siberia-coldest-inhabited-village/), and [Bhutan’s Paro airport, where only a few pilots are allowed to land](https://badiyaa.com/paro-airport-bhutan-certified-pilots/). Until then, the barge keeps coming each July, and the health director keeps a second job as mayor of 82 people. ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: Kalawao County, Hawaii](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalawao_County,_Hawaii) - [National Park Service: Kalaupapa National Historical Park](https://www.nps.gov/kala/index.htm) *Image: Forest and Kim Starr, CC BY 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*