Somerset County lies north of the Maryland border between Laurel Ridge and a line that loosely follows the crest of the Little Allegheny Mountain and the Allegheny Ridge. Formed from the western half of Bedford County in 1795, Somerset County is dominated by ridge and valley...
The borough of Somerset relied solely on Glades Pike (PA 31), a road farther south but nearly parallel to the Lincoln Highway and Forbes Road (U.S. 30), for transportation when the earliest settlers moved here in the 1770s. Somerset became the county seat in 1795. A...
Gray, formerly known as Biesecker in honor of original landholder Frederick Biesecker, was laid out in 1913. Developed by the Consolidation Coal Company, the town is filled with small, two-story houses built from three or four patterns, each surrounded by an expanse of lawn. When the...
Boswell was founded to support the Merchant Coal Company's Orenda Mine No. 1, which opened in 1901 and employed over 900 men at its peak, most of whom were Slavs, Poles, and Italians. The company built housing and public buildings in addition to the necessary mine...
The Windber area mines, owned and operated by the Philadelphia-based Berwind-White Coal Company, produced nearly 90 percent of the company's Pennsylvania coal, which it sold primarily to ocean-going steamship lines. With a population of over 10,000, the borough of Windber was the...
Meyersdale is laid out on two grids spreading north and south of Flaugherty Creek east of the Casselman River. It was the site of such early rural industries as Andrew Borntrager's gristmill of 1789. In 1815, Jacob Meyers Jr. bought land in the area, and erected a...
This region comprises three large counties bordering New York (Warren, McKean, and Potter) and the forested counties south of them (Clinton, Cameron, Elk, Forest, Clarion, Jefferson, and Clearfield). The topography is a continuation of the Appalachian Plateau, but at a higher elevation,...
Warren County is rectangular in shape, with the Allegheny River angling toward its center from the northeastern corner and turning south at the city of Warren. Prehistoric Native American tribes as well as later Eries, Delawares, and Shawnee used Conewango and Brokenstraw creeks as...
The Eries, Delawares, and Shawnee called the land on which the city of Warren is situated Conewango, after the creek that flowed south from Lake Chautauqua in New York. Warren is one of seven western Pennsylvania towns created by the state between 1783 and 1795 to stimulate settlement...
Tidioute has an important group of buildings located at a point where the Allegheny River runs east–west. The small village along the Warren-Franklin turnpike (U.S. 62) grew from a population of 400 to 10,000 when the oil started to flow in the 1860s (its population is now less than...
As part of the Allegheny Plateau, McKean County has hilly topography reaching heights of from 1,400 to 1,600 feet, and has earned the designation “High Plateau.” The Allegheny River, cutting across the northeastern corner of the county, and the watersheds of Potato, Tuna (aka...
Smethport is located on a floodplain adjacent to Potato Creek, which empties into the Allegheny River. The John Keating Land Company, whose agent surveyed the site in 1807, donated land for the settlement. Keating chose to name it after his two Amsterdam bankers, Raymond and...
Located at the confluence of Tuna, Kendall, and Foster creeks, Bradford was established as a supply town for the lumber industry. Originally called Littleton, it was named after the U.S. Land Company's agent, Colonel Leavitt C. Little. By 1854, the town's name was...
The southern and western parts of McKean County were the last to be settled, since they were inaccessible by water. In 1856, Thomas Leiper Kane visited the area and two years later, after his father's death, took up the challenge of developing it. Kane was an avid reformer and a man of...
Potter County, surveyed in the 1790s, was owned largely by Philadelphian William Bingham, the Ceres Land Company, and the Holland Land Company at the time of its incorporation in 1804. The county was named for Irish-born Revolutionary War officer Major General James Potter, who ran...
Coudersport, with a population of just under 3,000, is the largest town in heavily wooded Potter County. It was named for Jean Samuel Coudere, an Amsterdam banker who loaned money to the Ceres Land Company of Philadelphia for their Pennsylvania land purchases. Located in the...
Clinton County was established in 1839 when settler Jerry Church, after three years of failed attempts to have “Eagle County” chartered, simply switched the name to “Clinton.” The required legislation passed before the committee members realized that nothing but the name had been...
Settler Jerry Church's donation of land made Lock Haven the county seat, and he laid out the grid plan for the city. The town was incorporated as a borough in 1840 and became a city by 1849. The west branch of the Pennsylvania Canal came into Lock Haven (actually,...
The abundance of creeks and streams in Clinton County gave rise to a thriving milling industry in the nineteenth century. The most significant mill in the county is in Woolrich in Pine Creek Township. John Rich II began by carding the wool for socks and blankets sold to...
With almost its entire area covered by second-growth forest and a population of under 6,000, Cameron County is a quiet, scenic, central Pennsylvania landscape dotted with seasonal hunting and fishing cabins. The county was organized in 1860, from portions of Clinton, Elk, McKean,...
Elk County lies on the Allegheny High Plateau, with elevations of 1,400 feet rising to 2,500 feet above sea level. There are two major watersheds: the Clarion River flowing west to the Allegheny and Sinnemahoning Creek flowing east to the Susquehanna.
The Seneca Indians and...
Named for wealthy Quaker packet merchant Jacob Ridgway of Philadelphia, the borough nestles into a bend of the Clarion River where Elk Creek intersects it. Ridgway and his nephew-in-law and land agent James L. Gillis rode the hilly countryside scouting a place for the town. Jacob...
David Johnson and his wife arrived at this junction of the east and west branches of the Clarion River from Salem, New Jersey, in 1810. They named the town Coopersport for Benjamin F. Cooper of Salem, who owned 400,000 acres of nearby land. However, the Johnson name clung to the...
Although western Pennsylvania's small towns usually have several Presbyterian and Methodist churches, St. Mary's represents one of several Roman Catholic settlements in the northern tier. St. Mary's beginnings differ from those of other Catholic enclaves in western...
Forest County is, as one would expect, tree covered, and has such a small population that there is not one stoplight in it. Since three-fourths of the land is government owned, it has five times more seasonal homes than permanent ones. Its shape is determined by the irregular...
Though organized as a borough in 1852 under Venango County, Tionesta was not made the county seat of Forest County until 1866. At that time the population doubled with the discovery of oil to the south and the corresponding boom in the lumber trade. The town, laid out in a grid...
Northeast of Tionesta along East Hickory Creek, this small lumber camp village was named for a group of men who met over the company store and called themselves the “Christian Endeavor.” The village was the site of an early sawmill, purchased in 1837 by Wheeler and Dusenbury Lumber...
Clarion County, encompassing part of the Allegheny Plateau, is characterized by low hills crisscrossed by streams. The area was included in the Treaty with the Six Nations of 1784 signed at Fort Stanwix (Rome, New York) and Fort McIntosh (Beaver). Much of the land was purchased at...
The borough of Clarion was laid out in 1839 by John Sloan Jr. with lots among the pine trees one mile southeast of the Clarion River's banks. James Campbell, who arrived in 1840, said it looked more like a camp meeting than a town, according to a pamphlet in the Clarion Free Library...
