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I'd like to explore the connection between altitude and suicide rates discussed in the 2011 paper, Positive Association between Altitude and Suicide in 2584 U.S. Counties.
I can get some data for the suicide rates from the CDC WISQARS site, though unfortunately they don't report raw data for small population counties.
I'm still looking for a data set providing elevation data for counties, such as the elevation of the county seats or a mean elevation for the whole county.
You'll have to mash things a little but this is available for free and should be fairly easy to setup:
Download the 2014 National Gazetteer, County Dataset, a tab delimited text file with 3200+ US counties, by state, ANSI code with Lat and Long.
Then, bang away at the USGS National Elevation Dataset Query Service for the elevation of a given lat/long.
The Query Service page has code for both HTTP Get and HTTP Post.
Here's some MISC resources to add to Kotebiya answer. Below is the USGS quick facts on elevations in the US. It has a list of the high/lowest for the largest 50 cities. Some other tables as well.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/gip/Elevations-Distances/elvadist.html
Maryland's GIS site has a list of high/low per county:
http://www.mgs.md.gov/geology/highest_and_lowest_elevations.html
This is a hiking site that also contains a lot of elevation data:
census has longitude and latitude here by county: https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/centersofpop.html
elevation data is also here: http://nationalmap.gov/elevation.html
I was thinking you might be able to link the two together.
It's not free but for $39.95(USD) it might cover what you need.
I went to this website (USGS board on geographic names), downloaded each state's information and then filtered the rows with "county" in the place name. Each state's URL can be programatically manipulated easily.
