In 1792, the commonwealth promised the area around Fryburg to the Holland Land Company, a group of wealthy Amsterdam investors, in return for their loans financing the Revolutionary War. The land company's agent, Harm Jan Huidekoper, came to the United States in 1805 and bought some...
East Brady sits on a tongue of land outlined by the Allegheny River in the southwest corner of Clarion County. Access to East Brady, originally named Cunningham after an early farm owner, was over a steep road and then via ferry or barge from the west. The Allegheny Valley...
St. Petersburg was known as Petersburg originally and named for Judge Richard Peters of Philadelphia, who owned much of the land and donated five acres for the church and cemetery. Its name was changed to St. Petersburg in 1862 by the postal service. The village boomed during...
The Fox family's name was recorded on signposts and maps prior to the borough's official existence, since they owned over 13,000 acres of land in the area. The remote forested tract was difficult to reach by wagon and steamboat, which defeated an early attempt by Samuel...
Jefferson County is named for Thomas Jefferson, president of the United States at the time of the county's formation in 1804. It was under part of Indiana County's jurisdiction from 1806 to 1830, and initially contained what later became Elk and Forest counties. Jefferson County...
Pennsylvania has many beautiful small towns, but Brookville is among its finest. Nestled into the hillside away from the floodplain created by the convergence of North Fork and Sandy Lick creeks, which join to create Red Bank Creek, the borough was surveyed and...
Reynoldsville was the site of a Native American village and a hemlock swamp. The Indian path provided a natural location for a later turnpike, whose builders settled along the pike and built the first bridge over Sandy Lick Creek in 1822. The settlement was called Prospect Hill...
Punxsutawney is both the oldest and the largest town in the county. Reverend David Barclay laid it out in a grid pattern along Big Mahoning Creek c. 1818, and it was organized as a borough in 1851. The name is derived from the Native American words meaning “town of...
Formed where two ridge roads cross, Sigel was founded in 1828 to serve the lumber companies as they worked their way across northern Pennsylvania, clear-cutting the virgin timber. In the 1880s, there were two hotels and a blacksmith shop, and two stores owned by Henry...
The county's terrain is a succession of ridges and hills with the West Branch Susquehanna River cutting through the region from southwest to northeast. Larger in area than the state of Rhode Island, the county takes its name from the buffalo wallows Native Americans found here...
Clearfield was an early Lenni Lenape village called Chinkleclacamousche, which means “no one lingers here.” Surely a chamber of commerce publicist's nightmare, it was apparently named for a Native American hermit who affected horrifying costumes to frighten returning hunters into...
Curwensville is named for its earliest landowner, John Curwen, who settled here in 1799 and laid out forty-eight lots between Thompson and Locust streets. The town is divided into thirds by the West Branch Susquehanna River and Anderson Creek. It sits on high rolling land...
When itinerant Methodist minister James McGee brought his family to Clearfield County from Centre County in 1826, they essentially built their own small village, focusing it around a sawmill and a gristmill. To the southeast, below the level of the U.S. 219, the West Branch...
The area around DuBois was a large beaver meadow until after the Civil War, when John E. DuBois began to harvest the timber from his twenty thousand acres of land. Between 1872, when three families laid out the town of Rumbarger, and 1887, when the population grew to around 6,000, the...
This region of northwestern Pennsylvania is made up of Erie, Crawford, Venango, Mercer, and Lawrence counties. The region's topography is unique in the commonwealth, composed of relatively flat land creating a gently rolling surface formed by glacial action nearly 15,000 years ago....
Erie County is part of the geological region in Pennsylvania carved out by the Wisconsinan glacier less than 15,000 years ago. The county is covered with compacted silts and clays whose undulating surface makes excellent farmland. As the glacier receded, it paused periodically,...
Erie is located on a series of plateaus and ridges formed by the receding Wisconsinan glacier. Northward-flowing streams, including Mill and Cascade creeks, cut through the glacial drift to create dramatic scenery. French traders found that the bay at Presque Isle, the spit...
North East was the first of the original sixteen townships in the Erie Triangle to be settled by New England emigrants. It is slightly inland from Lake Erie because the Pennsylvania Population Company's earliest settlers found the flatlands immediately surrounding the lake too...
Waterford's site has always been strategic. For Native Americans it was the end of a portage from Lake Erie to Le Boeuf Creek. To the French, who shipped and traveled by river, it was an important link between their domains in Canada and Louisiana. The French called present-day...
Edinboro was settled in 1796 by a group from Williamsport in Lycoming County because of its location along the Venango Trail (now U.S. 19, and here in Edinboro, Meadville Street) and its access to French Creek via the Big Conneautee Creek and lake. Twenty miles south of the city of...
Named for Stephen Girard, the Philadelphia financier who owned land in the area, Girard was incorporated in 1846. With soil deposited from ancient glaciers and a climate tempered by Lake Erie, fruit production thrives in the region. Because of its convenient location along the main...
Crawford County, Pennsylvania's largest county on its Ohio border, was formed out of Allegheny County in 1800. It was named for Colonel William Crawford, Indian fighter and business agent of George Washington, who was tortured to death during an Ohio expedition in 1782. Settlers...
Meadville occupies a strategic location along French Creek, a main thorough-fare for Native Americans and French colonizers, and a pathway between two French forts: Le Boeuf (now Waterford in Erie County) and Machault (Franklin in Venango County). The Iroquois of the Six Nations...
Saegertown's site on French Creek made it an attractive place for Major Roger Alden's saw and grist mills in 1800, and it became the market center for the farms of Woodcock Township. In 1824, Daniel Saeger and several German compatriots laid out the town in time to take advantage...
Located on French Creek, Cambridge Springs is a railroad town today, bisected by the tracks that run east to west, which helped it grow at the turn of the twentieth century. The town served as an agricultural marketplace for local farmers shipping their goods...
Jonathan Titus and his uncle Samuel Kerr, surveyors for the Holland Land Company, claimed a large part of the land surrounding what is today Titusville, and settled along the banks of Oil Creek in 1796. Noticing that the “Seneca's Oil” that Native Americans soaked up...
Venango County, created in 1800, straddles the Allegheny River and two navigable tributaries, French and Oil creeks, which empty into the Allegheny. At the confluence of each is a major town: Franklin at French Creek and the Allegheny, and Oil City at Oil Creek. The county's name...
Franklin was laid out in 1795 by Andrew Ellicott, who four years earlier had been chosen by George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to work on the town plan of Washington, D.C. During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Franklin had four forts within its...
Oil City lies seven miles north of Franklin at the confluence of Oil Creek and the Allegheny River. Three distinct sections of the city are connected by bridges: a narrow river plain and steeply wooded hillside west of Oil Creek; a wider floodplain and hilly residential section...
Pleasantville, located along West Pithole Creek, was settled by Aaron Benedict soon after he came west to build a portion of the Susquehanna and Waterford Turnpike. In 1819, he purchased from the Holland Land Company a large portion of the land now called...
