Hemmed in by the steep northern bank of the Allegheny River and a hill, Emlenton grew on a floodplain less than half a mile wide. The land around Emlenton was purchased in 1796 by Samuel Mickle Fox of Philadelphia, and named for his daughter-in-law, Hannah Emlen, who married Joseph...
The area that is now Mercer County was originally part of Allegheny County, and has a thirty-two-mile border with Ohio on the west. It contained both Donation and Depreciation Lands surveyed between 1785 and 1795 by Benjamin Stokely, who settled in what became Mercer County after...
Laid out in 1803 and incorporated in 1814 on two hundred acres of land donated by John Hoge of Washington County, Mercer had an important connection to its southern neighbor. Washington County farmers brought their sheep to Mercer and established wool making as an...
Sharon, only two miles east of the Ohio border, was settled in 1803 by Benjamin Bentley and laid out by William Budd in 1815. Sharon and Mercer were joined by a road in 1815, which was continued west after the first bridge was built across the Shenango River in 1818–1819...
A section of Greenville was laid out in 1819 by Thomas Bean and William Scott on the west bank of the Shenango River, but the town grew after Joseph Keck plotted both sides of the river in 1826. Greenville was incorporated in 1838. The Shenango River waterpower was harnessed for...
In 1798, Valentine and Margaret Cunningham built the first gristmill along Wolf Creek in the southeast corner of Mercer County. Their son's brick house of 1845, now part of Grove City College ( ME23), remains on E. Main Street. The...
Before 1849, the year Lawrence County was created, the boundaries of Beaver and Mercer counties cut through the center of the city of New Castle. Perhaps to commemorate a tenacious fight by residents to end this confusing situation, it was named for Captain James Lawrence of the U...
New Castle was laid out in a grid pattern on fifty acres of flat, open land at the confluence of the Shenango River and Neshannock Creek. It was designed with an open market square, or diamond (actually an oval). Settlers from New Castle, Delaware, led by John Carlyle Stewart,...
When limestone deposits were discovered in the area c. 1887, this small industrial town was built to house workers near the quarries. It was named for Sir Henry Bessemer, who discovered that limestone was an important component in steelmaking. Incorporated in 1913,...
New Wilmington was laid out c. 1824 by James Waugh and his sons. It has the timeless quality of a nineteenth-century crossroads town, with its treeshaded, grid-patterned streets and lack of manufacturing plants. The flat and fertile land has attracted...
Located in Perry Township, Wurtemburg was first settled in 1796 by Ananias Allen on Slippery Rock Creek within half a mile of its confluence with Connoquenessing Creek. Allen built one of the earliest gristmills in the area, and attracted customers from as far away as New Castle....
Ellwood City straddles the border of southern Lawrence and northern Beaver counties. It was developed by the Pittsburgh Company, a real estate group set up by Beaver Falls wire entrepreneur Henry Waters Hartman. In 1890, Hartman's consortium bought six hundred acres of former...
I do not know what it is that is so welcome to me in the Pennsylvania landscape, but it is the same quality—perhaps of reposing in the certainty that truth is good—that exists in Pennsylvania faces....
After receiving the grant of lands fronting the Delaware River in 1681, William Penn immediately set about planning a city that would be the economic center of his holdings. He first imagined a row of great houses along the Delaware River, with...
The town lies in a very pleasant country, from north to south along the river. It measures somewhat more than an English mile in length, and its breadth in some places is half a mile or more. The ground is flat and consists of sand mixed with a little clay....
The Court House stands in the middle of Market Street to the west of the market. It is a fine building with a small tower and a bell. Below and around this building the market is held every week.—PEHR KALM, Travels in North America (1750)...
The Free Society of Traders was a stock company organized by friends of William Penn in 1682 to operate in Philadelphia with title to all the fishes in the river and with the privilege to establish markets, fairs, and other commercial ventures in the new community. Their property...
South Philadelphia continued the urban fabric of the old city, merging with the Swedish settlement as is evident in such street names as Christian—not for the religion but for the Swedish king—and in a few surviving structures. The area became the entry point for many immigrants...
Penn's original South-East Square was renamed for the nation's first president in the early nineteenth century. After serving as a potters’ field and burial ground for Revolutionary soldiers, it became a fashionable residential square in the early nineteenth...
During the eighteenth century, the portion of Market Street west of 6th Street was largely residential with individual homes, boardinghouses, and small hotels vying for space. In the nineteenth century, as the city grew, the central markets extended west,...
In William Penn's plan, Broad Street was intended as the major cross street to High Street. It now extends from the southern point of the Philadelphia peninsula to the cleft in the Vof the city at its north. Because Philadelphia principally...
The construction of City Hall ( PH49) at Centre Square ensured that a new downtown would eventually be built at William Penn's feet. Here corporate skyscrapers attested to the concentration of wealth in metropolitan...
The Rittenhouse Square neighborhood is as rich and worthy of close inspection as Society Hill with numerous blocks of large houses interspersed with churches and other institutions. Houses are often four stories in height and clad in brownstone. The nearly...
North of Rittenhouse Square in the vicinity of S. 22nd Street between Walnut and Sansom streets is another cluster of important Victorian houses that owes its origin to St. James’ Episcopal Church (1870–1871). A vigorous Gothic Revival essay in vivid (and ephemeral)...
Philadelphia's post–World War II downtown rivals Independence Mall ( PH12.1) as an architectural and planning disappointment. In the 1920s, the Pennsylvania Railroad developed a scheme that would replace Furness's massive...
The Schuylkill River roads connect center city with the vast seven-thousand-acre tract of Fairmount Park. Among the special charms of the park are nearly a dozen houses that recall the first use of the then distant river edge as a retreat for the few from the...
Industrial neighborhoods formed where water flow could power mills and in turn were later supplanted by steam and electric power. East Falls became the site of two immense mill complexes, John Dobson's vast conglomeration of rubble stone cloth mills at Ridge Avenue and...
The westward extension of Market Street became the principal entrance to the city, first by a ferry and after 1800 by Timothy Palmer's immense woodtruss, arched toll bridge that helped turn 30th Street into a regional transportation hub....
To the west of the University of Pennsylvania campus is a handsome Victorianera suburb whose extent was first limited by the horsecar lines and later by the electric trolley routes. East of S. 44th Street are important pre–Civil War era houses, including Woodland...
Germantown had its origins nearly simultaneously with the beginnings of Penn's city when a group of Dutch Quakers from Krefeld and Kresheim in partnership with a group of Germans from Frankfurt purchased fifteen thousand acres in 1683 and brought their distinct culture and architecture...
