The PhD is, simply put, a research degree. If you look at the CVs of people who teach at top LACs, you'll notice that they mostly went to the same schools as people who teach at top research universities. Looking at, for example, Swarthmore's faculty (see here), the faculty come from: Princeton, Yale (x2), Harvard (x2), UCSD, UChicago, Oxford, and OSU. For another top teaching school, this time Middlebury, I find people from Harvard (x3), Chicago, Cornell (x2), American, Stanford, Colorado, Emory, Berkeley (x2), and Princeton. In other words, a very similar mix of schools to what you would find at a research-focused school.
What I've been told is that for a teaching career, you should just go to the program that fits you best in terms of quality and research interests, then try to take whatever opportunities are available there to do as much teaching as possible.