Century Farm Program
Towanda, Bradford County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
In 1949, the Bradford County Historical Society, then located in the courthouse annex, initiated the first Century Farm program in Pa. Based on NY’s Order of Century Farmers, the program recognized farms that had been owned and operated by the same family for at least 100 years. In 1976, the Pa. Department of Agriculture adopted the society’s model and has since designated more than 2,000 Century and Bicentennial Farms throughout the state.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In 1949 the Bradford County Historical Society, then housed in the courthouse annex in Towanda, launched Pennsylvania's first Century Farm program, modeled on New York's Order of Century Farmers. The idea was simple and enduring: honor farms held and worked by the same family for a hundred years or more. In 1976 the state Department of Agriculture adopted the model, and it has since recognized more than 2,000 Century and Bicentennial Farms across Pennsylvania.
Why it matters
The program gave formal recognition to the multigenerational family farm, a quiet institution at the heart of rural American identity and continuity.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
By the middle of the twentieth century, the family farm was already becoming something people worried about losing. Across rural Pennsylvania, the northern-tier counties like Bradford had been worked by the same families for generations — cleared, drained, and coaxed into productivity acre by acre. But the years after World War II brought tractors, consolidation, and young people leaving the land for city jobs. A farm that had passed from parent to child for a century suddenly looked less like the ordinary way of things and more like a quiet achievement worth naming.
Towanda sat at the heart of this world. As the county seat, it was where the courthouse stood and where the Bradford County Historical Society kept its collections in the courthouse annex. Local historical societies of that era were more than dusty archives; they were the memory-keepers of communities that felt time speeding up around them. It made sense that the impulse to honor enduring farms would come from exactly such a place.
The idea did not arise in a vacuum. Neighboring New York had already created its Order of Century Farmers, celebrating farms held by one family for a hundred years or more. Pennsylvania's historians looked across the state line, saw something good, and decided to try it at home.
People & events
In 1949, the Bradford County Historical Society launched what became Pennsylvania's first Century Farm program. The concept was elegantly simple: recognize any farm that had been owned and worked by the same family for at least a hundred years. No grand endowment, no bureaucracy — just a formal acknowledgment that continuity itself was worth honoring.
What began as a county project had staying power. For decades it recognized the families who had held their ground, literally, through booms, busts, droughts, and the slow churn of generations. Each designation was a small ceremony of belonging, tying a living family to the people who had first broken that soil.
The turning point came in 1976, the nation's bicentennial year — a moment when Americans everywhere were looking back at their own roots. That year the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture adopted the historical society's model and carried it statewide. What one county had invented, the whole commonwealth now embraced. Since then, more than two thousand farms across Pennsylvania have been recognized as Century or Bicentennial Farms.
Its place in the American story
The multigenerational family farm is one of the quiet foundations of the American story. Long before the phrase existed, the promise of land held and worked by a family across generations drew settlers westward and shaped how the country imagined itself. To measure a farm not in acres or yield but in the unbroken chain of a single family is to honor persistence — a virtue Americans have always claimed as their own.
What makes this Towanda program notable is that a small county historical society built something the state chose to keep. Programs like these now exist in many states, and together they form a kind of national ledger of rural endurance. They put a name and a certificate to what would otherwise be an untold private history.
The program also marks a shift in how communities value the past. Recognizing a working farm — not a battlefield or a birthplace, but a place still plowed each spring — insists that ordinary continuity is itself historic. That is a democratic idea about history, and it took root here.
If you visit
Towanda is a classic northern-Pennsylvania county seat, the kind of town organized around a courthouse and a Main Street with more history than square footage. Standing near this marker, it is worth remembering that the whole statewide program traces back to work done in the courthouse annex just steps away.
As you drive the surrounding Bradford County countryside, watch the roadsides and farm lanes. Many Century and Bicentennial Farms display their own signs at the end of the driveway — a small, proud announcement that this land has stayed in one family longer than most towns have existed. Once you know to look, you will start seeing them.
This marker rewards the traveler who likes their history working and lived-in rather than roped off. Pair it with a slow loop through the region's rolling farmland, and let the fields themselves tell the rest of the story.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
Plan your visit
NearbyMake a day of it — museums, food, and places to stay near this marker.
Museums & culture
- Tioga Point Museum13.3 mi away
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Themes & tags
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