James G. Blaine

Brownsville, PA · est. 1946

John A. Brashear, born here in 1840, rose from a working life in the mills to become one of America's most celebrated makers of precision telescope lenses and mirrors, and a beloved educator. His grandfather ran the Brashear House, a leading tavern on the National Road through Brownsville. In 1825 the Marquis de Lafayette, touring the nation he had helped free, addressed the townspeople from its doorway.

Monessen, PA · est. 1999

The steel town of Monessen produced more than iron and glass — it gave the world a Nobel laureate. Christian B. Anfinsen, born here in 1916, became a biochemist whose work on the enzyme ribonuclease helped reveal how a protein's chain of amino acids alone determines its folded, functional shape. That insight, honored with the 1972 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, came during decades leading a laboratory at the National Institutes of Health before he turned to teaching at Johns Hopkins.

Carmichaels, PA · est. 1953

Established by act of the Pennsylvania legislature in 1810 and aided by a state grant and local subscriptions, Greene Academy brought advanced schooling to Carmichaels when much of western Pennsylvania was still frontier country. For half a century it stood among the leading academies west of the mountains, educating young people far from the older schools of the East. Its old building still stands nearby.

Jefferson, PA · est. 1960

In the years just after the Civil War, the Ten Mile Baptist Association set out to plant higher learning in the hills of southwestern Pennsylvania, founding what became the first Baptist college west of the Alleghenies in the state. Chartered by the legislature in 1871, Monongahela College opened its doors to students in a rural corner of Greene County, but like many small denominational schools of the era it struggled to stay solvent, closing, reopening, and finally shutting for good in 1894. Its brick 1871 college building still stands nearby as a reminder of that ambition.