Hannastown
Hempfield Township, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Site of former county seat of Westmoreland County is just east of here. First county seat west of mountains, 1773. Citizens adopted a Declaration in support of the Revolution, 1775. Burned by the Indians in 1782.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
Just east of here stood Hannastown, established in 1773 as the seat of Westmoreland County and the first county seat west of the Allegheny Mountains. Its citizens gathered in 1775 to adopt a bold declaration backing the Revolutionary cause, an early frontier voice for independence. In 1782, near the end of the war, a raiding party burned the town, and it never fully recovered.
Why it matters
Hannastown shows how the Revolution reached even the rawest western frontier, where settlers organized self-government and declared for liberty years before independence was secured, then paid for it in fire.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In the years before the Revolution, the land west of the Allegheny Mountains was the ragged edge of British America. Getting there meant hauling everything you owned over steep ridges on rough traces, and once you arrived you were far from courts, sheriffs, and the settled machinery of colonial government. This was frontier Pennsylvania in the raw.
When Westmoreland County was organized in 1773, it gave that scattered population something it had lacked: a seat of local authority on their own side of the mountains. For the first time, the business of law and record-keeping did not require a long journey east. A county seat this far out was a statement that permanent, self-governing communities had come to stay.
All of this unfolded just as the quarrel between the colonies and the Crown was hardening into open conflict. Even here, at the far western reach of settlement, the political temperature was rising, and the arguments echoing through Philadelphia and Boston found an audience among frontier farmers.
People & events
The story here turns on two moments, years apart. In 1775, with the imperial crisis boiling over, local citizens gathered and adopted a declaration throwing their support behind the Revolutionary cause. That these frontier settlers organized to put their loyalties on record — early, and in writing — says a great deal about how deeply the fight for independence had reached ordinary people far from the seaboard.
The second moment came in 1782, near the war's end, when a raiding party burned the town. Along the western frontier the Revolution was not fought in tidy set-piece battles but in scattered raids and reprisals that fell hardest on isolated communities. The fire was a devastating blow, and the town never truly recovered its former standing.
What is striking is the arc between those two dates: a community that stepped forward to declare for liberty, then bore the war's violence directly. The people who signed on in 1775 could not have known the cost that lay ahead of them.
Its place in the American story
We tend to picture the Revolution in Philadelphia, Boston, and the great eastern battlefields. This site is a reminder that the same convictions were taking hold at the very margins of the map, among people with the least protection and the most to lose.
It also marks a milestone in the westward reach of American self-government. Establishing a functioning county seat beyond the mountains meant that courts, records, and civic life were following settlers into the interior — the slow, unglamorous work of extending a governed society across a continent.
That those two threads — frontier self-government and revolutionary commitment — met in one small place is the point. The founding was not only an eastern achievement. It was also carried forward by rough communities on the edge of the wilderness who chose a side and paid for the choice.
If you visit
The town itself is gone; what you come for is the ground and the story it holds. Stand here and picture how remote this spot once was — a hard-won foothold reached by climbing over the ridges you likely just drove across in comfort.
Read the marker, then look east, where the old county seat stood. Let the two dates on the inscription do their work: a community declaring for the Revolution, and then, years later, the fire. Holding both in mind is what makes the place resonate.
It fits naturally into a road trip through the Westmoreland County countryside, where the settled farmland today makes a quiet contrast with the exposed frontier this once was. Give yourself a few minutes to let that contrast land before moving on.
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 events
- · Hannastown Resolves
- · Burning of Hannastown
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Arthur St. Clair (1737-1818)
Greensburg, PA · est. 1995
Born in Thurso, Scotland, Arthur St. Clair rose to Major General in the Continental Army during the Revolution and served as President of the Continental Congress in 1787. He was later appointed the first Governor of the Northwest Territory, the vast lands between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers being opened to American settlement. A longtime Westmoreland County figure, he spent his last years on Chestnut Ridge and is buried just east of this marker.
Westmoreland County
Greensburg, PA · est. 1981
Carved from Bedford County in 1773, Westmoreland was for a time the sprawling frontier of southwestern Pennsylvania and the first place English law reached beyond the Allegheny Mountains. At its early seat of Hanna's Town, backcountry settlers gathered in 1775 to adopt the "Hanna's Town Resolves," a defiant pledge of resistance drafted as revolution stirred in the colonies. Greensburg later rose as the county seat, incorporated in 1799 as the region settled into peacetime governance.
Fort Allen
Hempfield Township, PA · est. 1946
A little to the south once stood a fortified post raised in 1774 by Pennsylvania German pioneers of the Brush Creek and Harrold's settlements. In an era of frontier violence, such a stockade offered ordinary farm families a place to shelter during Dunmore's War and the American Revolution. It was a small but vital node in the network of refuges that let settlement cling to this exposed edge of colonial Pennsylvania.
Arthur St. Clair
Unity Township, PA · est. 1946
In a quiet hollow south of this spot stood the final home of Arthur St. Clair, a Scottish-born soldier who gave much of his life to the young United States. He fought as a general in the Continental Army, served in the Continental Congress, and became the first governor of the vast Northwest Territory that would one day form the heart of the Midwest. He died in relative obscurity, and his grave lies at Greensburg.