Greene County Historical Society Museum (Greene Hills Farm, Rinehart House)

This is a very large version (nine by four bays) of the typical western Pennsylvania farmhouse. The extravagance of its size prompted Jacob Rinehart to sell it a year after it was built to Robinson Downey, who three weeks later sold it to the county for ten times as much as he paid, ironically for use as a poor farm, a home for paupers. The county's indigent adults (approximately sixty per year) were housed in this facility from 1861 to 1964. In the early years, alcoholics, unmarried mothers, and mentally ill and mentally challenged adults were mixed together and, before 1900, often abused. The national campaigns of Dorothea Dix from the 1850s to the 1880s and the Russell Sage Foundation after 1907 raised the standard of care for all the wards of the commonwealth.

The county made two large additions, first to the south of the original house in 1886, then to the west in 1900. The two-story, hipped-roof west wing with a central cupola has the appearance of a large school building and is equal in size to the original large farmhouse. A barn and carriage house on the property date from the time of the original Rinehart house. The boiler house and smokehouse were built for the poor farm.

The Greene County Historical Society moved to the property in 1969, and opened it as a museum in 1971. A log house, located southwest of the main building, was constructed in 1981 from the ruins of two separate cabins to demonstrate a dogtrot house form. The historical society holds several other properties in the county: the Coal Lick one-room school c. 1870 at this site; the W. A. Young Foundry and Machine Shop in Rice's Landing ( GR16); and the Crouse Schoolhouse (1900; PA 21, Furman Highway at Rush Run Road) in Center Township, a classic one-room schoolhouse used from 1900 to 1959. Constructed of red brick, it has a cupola, front porch, and the distinctive wooden sunburst attic vent seen on several Greene County buildings. The building's contents are preserved, and it is maintained as a museum.