Bordering Jacobs Creek and spreading over low hills to the northwest, the borough, originally called Fountain Mills, was first laid out in 1873 on the adjoining farms of Jacob and Peter Loucks, German Mennonites and cousins of Henry Clay Frick. The town's strategic location in the...
Isaac Robb laid out West Newton in 1796 on a southwest slope along the Youghiogheny River, naming it for his hometown, Newton, New Jersey. Prior to the construction of the National Road in the early nineteenth century, West Newton was a shipbuilding port on the river....
Fayette County is a study in contrasts: farms interspersed with coal patches and vernacular buildings between architect-designed houses. It contains many architectural delights, from the Isaac Meason House ( FA27) to Frank Lloyd...
Uniontown lies in a valley west of Chestnut Ridge at the intersection of several former Native American routes. Looking east from the valley, “the mountain,” or ridge, is a panorama of woods punctuated dramatically by the approximately sixty-foot-tall white Jumonville...
Shoaf is one of four company towns built between 1904 and 1917 in southwestern Fayette County by the Henry Clay Frick Coal and Coke Company. Although the Frick company owned many patch towns, most were built by various operators and then purchased by Frick. Shoaf was also the last...
Laid out in 1785 by Thomas Brown, Brownsville was a natural strategic point known then in the western counties as Redstone Old Fort. A major land to water transfer point for the westward journey, it was heavily used by early settlers traveling the Nemacolin Path (...
Perryopolis lies on land purchased by George Washington in 1769. Washington made seven trips to western Pennsylvania over a period of forty-one years, and purchased thousands of acres, many through his close friend and agent William Crawford, who fought in the French...
Connellsville, on the east bank of the Youghiogheny River, was laid out in 1790 as 180 quarter-acre lots by surveyor and land agent Virginian Zachariah Connell; it was incorporated in 1806. Initially, Connellsville's growth centered on the west bank village of New...
From the Native American “ohiopehhele,” which means “white, frothy water,” Ohiopyle was laid out in 1868 as the town of Pile Falls by Andrew Stewart, whose family held the land formed by a large loop in the Youghiogheny River. As it rounds the curve, the river drops...
Located on the National Road (U.S. 40) four miles east of Uniontown, Hopwood was named Woodstock when settled in 1791. It was renamed Monroe in 1816 after a visit from President James Monroe, and received its present appellation in 1881 to honor its founder, John Hopwood from...
Greene County, at the southwest corner of Pennsylvania, has been a crossroads for millennia. Round stockaded villages of prehistoric tribes preceded the Shawnee and Delaware, who later encountered the early English and French explorers. Colonial British settlement began in the mid-...
The county seat of Waynesburg was founded in 1796, less than a year after the county's formation and located within five miles of its geographical center. It is named for General Anthony Wayne, the tireless warrior of the Revolutionary War who was...
Garards Fort, named for a family home that had been fortified and used as a fort in the late eighteenth century, has an interesting combination of buildings typical of the county's rural villages. At its western edge is the former farm of Andrew Lantz, with two handsome white...
Located on the west bank of the Monongahela River, Greensboro was laid out in 1787 by Elias Stone. The original town plan included eighty-six lots of one-half acre each on flat land along the high banks of the river. A gradually rising hillside allowed expansion to the west. The...
This company town, built in 1917 for the Buckeye Coal Company, a subsidiary of Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company in Ohio, contains over four hundred cedar-sided private residences constructed by Stone and Webster Construction Company between 1918 and 1925. Because it was laid out...
Named for John Rice, the landholder in 1786, this once thriving borough sat at lock No. 6 (constructed in the 1850s) on the Monongahela River. Today, it is a village of sixty-three buildings, including two c. 1930 brick lockkeepers' houses (133–135 Main Street) that...
Washington County was part of the land granted to the Plymouth Land Company by James I of England in 1606. Virginia claimed jurisdiction over it from 1752 to 1783, even after it became a Pennsylvania county in 1781, the first county in the United States named after George...
Chief Catfish of the (Kuskee) Delaware Indian Tribe was the first to settle on this land c. 1750. In 1769, David Hoge of Harrisburg bought three tracts in the region, and, in 1781, his son built a log house on the site of the present-day city of Washington. First...
John Purviance opened the first tavern on the future site of Claysville in 1800. As soon as news of the National Road's route through Washington County was disclosed in 1817, he laid out lots for the town and named it for Henry Clay, Kentucky's representative in the U.S. Congress...
West Middletown, laid out in 1796 as a stopover for travelers along the Wellsburg Pike, lies midway between Washington, Pennsylvania, and Wellsburg, West Virginia, an Ohio River departure point. West Middletown became a borough in 1823, and developed into a...
John Canon bought this land from the state of Virginia and established a sawmill and a gristmill along Chartiers Creek in the 1770s. Ten years later, he laid out lots on the land, and his name became permanently attached to it. Since that time, there has been a...
James William Ellsworth, a shipping entrepreneur from Hudson, Ohio, bought 16,000 acres of coal land in southeast Washington County in 1898, and studied the organization of mining towns in Wales. Ellsworth built his model mining community of locally fired red brick,...
Marianna, yellow-brick row houses.
This model mining town, built by the Pittsburgh-Buffalo Coal Company between 1906 and 1912, was noted for its...
West Brownsville was laid out by Ephraim L. Blaine, whose wife's family, the Gillespies, were the first European owners of the site in 1784. A ferry crossed the Monongahela River here until 1833, when a wooden covered bridge was built to accommodate coaches on the National...
Charleroi sits on the west bank of the Monongahela River, approximately forty-two miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Access to coal and natural gas and a wide floodplain made the site ideal as a manufacturing center after a rail connection was made c. 1880 via the Pittsburgh, Virginia...
Located in a deep valley along a curve of the Monongahela River and approximately thirty-seven miles south of Pittsburgh by river, this local farmland was called “Walnut Bottom,” c. 1769, and by 1815, was known as the village of Columbia, later West Columbia. Even today, the area is...
Monongahela grew around a ferry crossing on the Monongahela River. By the 1780s, the town was situated on a direct overland route to Washington, Pennsylvania, via what today is PA 136. One of its earliest settlers was Joseph Parkinson, who operated a ferry and an inn...
This region (Cambria, Blair, Centre, Huntingdon, Fulton, Bedford, and Somerset counties) encompasses the south-central portion of Pennsylvania west of Blue Mountain. It includes the geographic center of the commonwealth, in the appropriately named Centre County. The region's eastern...
Cambria County was formed in 1804 from parts of Huntingdon and Somerset counties. Topographically, it is part of a ridge and valley formation, bounded by Laurel Hill on the west and Allegheny Mountain on the east. Straddling the Continental Divide, Cambria's streams drain into both...
