Galusha Grow

Harford Township, PA · est. 1947

Galusha A. Grow rose from this rural corner of northeastern Pennsylvania to become one of the most consequential legislators of the mid-19th century. As a champion of "free soil," he spent years pushing the idea that a settler willing to work unclaimed federal land should be able to own it, a fight that finally succeeded with the Homestead Act of 1862. He presided over the U.S. House as Speaker during the opening years of the Civil War before returning to Congress decades later.

Nicholson Township, PA · est. 1995

When it opened in 1915 on the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad, the Tunkhannock Viaduct was the largest reinforced-concrete structure ever built. Stretching 2,375 feet and rising 240 feet above Tunkhannock Creek, it was the centerpiece of a nearly forty-mile line relocation meant to straighten and speed the railroad. The novelist Theodore Dreiser marveled at it as "one of the true wonders of the world."

Waverly Township, PA · est. 1948

Born in Connecticut in 1775, Elder Miller joined the stream of New England settlers who pushed into northeastern Pennsylvania's Abington region around 1800. On his own farm he hosted the township's first church and its first school, serving his neighbors as both preacher and teacher until his death in 1857. His homestead became the seedbed of community life on a raw frontier.

Harford Township, PA · est. 1947

This marker honors Galusha A. Grow near his final resting place in Harford, the community where he was schooled at Franklin Academy before entering public life. Known as the "Father of the Homestead Act," Grow spent his career advancing the principle that western public lands should be opened to free settlement, a cause realized in 1862. He served as Speaker of the House in the first years of the Civil War and returned to Congress near the turn of the century.