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 overlook the river. The parklike riverfront and banks of Pumpkin Run lend the village today a more pastoral appearance than it had in the nineteenth century. The Pittsburg [ sic], Monongahela and Southern Railroad reached Rice's Landing in 1907, occupying a ledge above the narrow shelf of the town's main street. It served the Dilworth Coal Mine, once one of the busiest shippers on the Monongahela, which also opened in 1907 and closed in 1927. Today its path is the Greene River Trail, a 3.8-mile hiking and biking trail connecting Greene Cove Marina at Tenmile Creek with Rice's Landing.
The former Rice's Landing National Bank (1914; Main Street at Dry Tavern Road) is a one-story, flat-roofed buff brick building with green and purple terra-cotta ornament that sits on the river's edge. Many of the borough's frame buildings have similar window surrounds and corner boards due to local access to heavy machinery, planing mills, and the great number of precut sections shipped by river and rail. For example, former Excelsior/Hewitt Pottery (c. 1870; 112 Water Street), built and operated by former schoolteacher Isaac Hewitt Jr., is a six-bay, gable-roofed structure now converted to housing, but the clapboarded building retains its stone foundation and boxed cornice and eaves returns, as well as its river's edge location.
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