After Crittenden County was separated from Livingston County in 1842, Livingston County moved its county seat from Salem to Smithland and began planning and constructing a new courthouse. A five-member commission of David Fort, L. W. Alcorn, Blount Hodge, William Gordon, and Isaac Shelby was appointed to plan the building and let the contract. The original design called for a fifty-foot by forty-foot structure with a foundation of good large stones below ground and dressed limestone above, walls of good mercantile brick two bricks thick or eighteen inches, a first floor sixteen feet high, a second floor twelve feet high, five fireplaces and flues, and cedar shingles. While construction continued, county courts met in local churches, the Gower House, and the Dallum Bush House. The first court session was held there in October 1844 before the building was finished, and construction was completed in August 1845. By 1852, county prosperity and growth led to the need for a separate building for the circuit court and the county clerks' offices and records. During the occupation of Smithland by Federal forces from September 1861 to July 1865, Union officers used the courthouse as a headquarters building and for other purposes, and local courts met in private residences and the court clerks' office building. During the depression of the 1930s, plans for a new courthouse were made but never carried out. In 1935, one of the last legal hangings in Kentucky took place in the courtyard behind the courthouse. During World War II, an iron fence erected around the public square in the 1850s was donated to a scrap metal drive. In the 1960s, four rooms were added, two on each floor, along with gas heat and air conditioning. As one of the few courthouses in far western Kentucky not burned during the Civil War or destroyed by fire at another time, it remains a visible and tangible link to an earlier period when river towns were centers of trade and commerce, and it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.