Westmoreland County
Greensburg, Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Formed on Feb 26, 1773 from Bedford County, it once comprised most of southwest Pennsylvania. First seat of English justice west of Alleghenies. Site of 1775 "Hanna's Town Resolves." Greensburg, county seat, was incorporated 1799.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
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.
Why it matters
It marks the reach of organized American law and self-government into the trans-Allegheny frontier, and one of the earliest expressions of revolutionary sentiment west of the mountains.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1773, when Westmoreland County was formed from Bedford County, the Allegheny Mountains still marked the ragged edge of the British colonial world. To the east lay settled farms, courts, and towns; to the west lay contested backcountry, Native nations, and the vast Ohio watershed that both Britain and its colonists eyed with restless ambition.
Westmoreland was enormous at its birth, sprawling across most of southwestern Pennsylvania. It was frontier in the fullest sense: thinly settled, hard to govern, and far from the comforts of the coastal cities. Life here meant clearing land, defending it, and improvising the institutions of civilization where none had existed.
This was also a land of overlapping claims and simmering tension. Pennsylvania and Virginia both asserted authority over the region, and settlers pushed onto lands that treaties had promised to Native peoples. Into this volatile mix, the county planted the first courts of English law west of the mountains — an audacious act of order on the edge of the unknown.
People & events
The county’s early seat was Hanna’s Town, a rough cluster of log buildings that became the first place English justice was formally administered beyond the Alleghenies. Here, on the frontier, settlers who might otherwise have been beyond the reach of any court found judges, juries, and the machinery of law.
It was at Hanna’s Town, in 1775, that backcountry residents gathered to adopt the resolves that bear the town’s name. As word of the clash between colonists and the Crown spread westward, these frontier people declared their own defiance — a statement of resistance drafted far from Philadelphia or Boston, among people who had the most exposed and dangerous stake in any war to come.
That this happened here, at the far margin of the colonies, is what makes it remarkable. Greensburg later rose as the county seat, incorporated in 1799, as the region cooled from wartime frontier into settled community. But the memory of Hanna’s Town — its courts and its defiance — remained the county’s founding drama.
Its place in the American story
The story of Westmoreland is the story of how American self-government reached beyond the mountains. It is easy to picture the Revolution as an affair of seaboard cities, but independence also had to be embraced and defended in places like this, where the risks were most immediate and the comforts of civilization fewest.
The Hanna’s Town Resolves show that revolutionary sentiment was not confined to the coast. When frontier settlers put their names to a pledge of resistance, they linked their remote corner of the map to the great cause taking shape across the colonies — proof that the impulse toward liberty ran deep and wide, not just where the pamphlets were printed.
The county’s courts carry a second kind of significance. Establishing the rule of law on the frontier was how the young republic would eventually organize an entire continent. The pattern set here — form a county, seat a court, extend the reach of ordered government — would repeat again and again as the nation expanded westward.
If you visit
A visit to this part of southwestern Pennsylvania rewards travelers who like their history quiet and their landscapes rolling. Greensburg today is a comfortable county seat, but the deeper story lies in imagining the frontier that once began right here, where the mountains gave way to wild country.
Seek out the memory of Hanna’s Town, where the county’s first courts sat and its settlers made their defiant stand. Standing on ground like this, you can feel how exposed these people were — how far from help, and how much courage it took to plant law and resistance in such a place.
Let the surrounding hills tell the rest. This was the launching country for westward movement, a threshold between the settled east and the open Ohio Valley. On a road trip, it pairs naturally with the broader frontier history of the region — a chance to trace how far, and how boldly, ordinary people carried the idea of self-rule into the wilderness.
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
- · Hanna's Town Resolves
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.
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.
Hannastown
Hempfield Township, PA · est. 1946
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.
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.