Ankeny Square
Somerset, Somerset County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Set aside for burial ground and place of worship on the original plat of Milfordstown by Ulrich Bruner, 1787, and by Peter Ankeny in 1789 when he laid out the south side of the settlement renamed Somerset in 1795.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In the years just after the Revolution, the frontier of southwestern Pennsylvania was being carved into towns lot by lot. When Ulrich Bruner first platted Milfordstown in 1787 and Peter Ankeny extended it in 1789, they set aside this ground for two of a young community's most essential needs — a place to bury the dead and a place to worship. By 1795 the growing settlement had taken the name Somerset, the county seat it remains today.
Why it matters
It preserves the founding footprint of a frontier county seat, a reminder that early American towns were deliberately designed around faith and community before they were anything else.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
The 1780s in southwestern Pennsylvania were a time of rapid, hopeful, and often improvised town-building. The Revolution had ended, the new nation was finding its feet, and settlers were pushing into the ridges and valleys west of the mountains. Land that had been contested frontier was now being surveyed, divided into lots, and sold to families looking for a fresh start.
A town in those years was not something that simply grew — it was drawn. A founder would lay out a "plat," a paper map of streets and lots, and from that grid a community would take shape. The Somerset County uplands, high and cool along the Allegheny front, were among the last corners of the state to be settled this way, and the town that became Somerset was stitched together out of two such plats laid a couple of years apart.
What makes this ground worth a marker is not a battle or a famous speech, but a decision made at the very beginning: that before the town was much of anything, room would be reserved for a burial ground and a place of worship. In an era when a settlement's survival was never guaranteed, that was a statement of intent — a bet that people would stay, raise families, and need somewhere to gather and to grieve.
People & events
The story begins with Ulrich Bruner, who laid out the original plat of Milfordstown in 1787 and set aside part of it for the community's spiritual needs. Two years later, in 1789, Peter Ankeny extended the settlement, laying out its south side and continuing that same commitment to shared ground.
These were the practical, unglamorous acts of town founding — measuring, mapping, and dedicating. Yet they carried real weight. By reserving land for burial and worship rather than selling every lot for profit, Bruner and Ankeny built the community's civic and religious life into its foundations, not as an afterthought.
The settlement's name changed as it grew, becoming Somerset in 1795. The town went on to serve as the seat of Somerset County, a role it still holds today. The square that carries Ankeny's name is a living trace of those founding gestures, made when the place was still young enough that its shape could be decided with a surveyor's chain and a few deliberate choices.
Its place in the American story
America's early towns are often remembered through their most dramatic moments, but most were born the way Somerset was — quietly, on paper, through the work of ordinary founders dividing land into lots. Multiply this scene by the thousands of communities laid out across the young republic, and you have the real engine of American settlement.
What this site captures especially well is a value that shaped countless frontier towns: the instinct to set aside common ground for faith and for the dead before almost anything else was built. A burial ground and a place of worship were among the first institutions a community claimed for itself, signs that people intended not just to pass through but to put down roots.
That founding footprint — a deliberate plan, a reserved public space, a name that stuck — is a small but genuine piece of the larger American story of how a wilderness frontier became a settled landscape of counties, courthouses, and hometowns.
If you visit
Come to Ankeny Square looking not for a monument but for a beginning. This is the kind of place that rewards a slow walk and a bit of imagination — picture the ground as an open square on a surveyor's map, deliberately kept from the rows of house lots around it.
Take in the setting of the town itself. Somerset sits high in the Allegheny uplands, and the air and light here have a different feel than the lowlands travelers pass through to reach it. As a county seat, the town center still gathers civic life around it, much as its founders intended when they reserved shared ground more than two centuries ago.
If you're building a road trip through southwestern Pennsylvania's mountain country, this is a good spot to pause and reset the scale of things. It's a reminder that behind every ordinary main street is an origin story — a moment when someone stood on empty ground and decided where the town would be.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Ulrich Bruner
- · Peter Ankeny
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Adam Schneider
Somerset, PA · est. 1954
In 1795, as settlement pushed into the mountains of western Pennsylvania, Adam Schneider laid out the northern half of the newly renamed town of Somerset. With his brother Jacob he opened the settlement's first store on this site, giving the young frontier community an early anchor of commerce and everyday life.
Somerset County
Somerset, PA · est. 1982
Formed in 1795 from Bedford County and named for an English shire, Somerset County took shape along the Forbes Road, the military route cut across the Alleghenies in 1758. Settlers followed that road westward, and the county seat was incorporated in 1804. Its high, cool farmland later became famous for maple syrup.
Harmon Husband
Somerset, PA · est. 1947
Harmon Husband arrived in the Somerset country as its first settler after fleeing North Carolina in 1771, where he had helped lead the Regulator uprising against colonial authority. Living for a time at his Coffee Springs farm, he never abandoned the cause of common people against government overreach, taking up his pen as a pamphleteer. In the 1790s he threw himself into the Whiskey Rebellion, the western Pennsylvania revolt against the federal excise tax, before his death in 1795.
Berlin
Berlin, PA · est. 1994
In 1794, the newly independent United States faced its first great test of federal authority when western Pennsylvania farmers rose up against a tax on whiskey — the region's chief cash crop and de facto currency. Berlin sat at the heart of that unrest: a schoolhouse riot broke out that June, and local merchant Robert Philson raised a liberty pole and urged neighbors to defy the law. When President Washington sent troops that autumn, Governor Thomas Mifflin made his headquarters at a doctor's house on this very ground.