2,561 markers in the database — showing 2,161–2,220.
Union Township, PA · est. 1949
In the first years of the 1700s, Swedish settlers took up land granted by William Penn and became the first Europeans to live in what is now Berks County. The stone home of Mounce and Ingeborg Jones, raised in 1716, still stands by the river bridge as the oldest house in the county. These pioneers were heirs to the earlier colony of New Sweden, carrying its people and building traditions up the Schuylkill into fresh country.
Jim Thorpe, PA · est. 1971
Built in 1827, the Mauch Chunk Switchback Railroad used nothing but gravity to roll loaded coal cars nine miles down the mountain from the Summit Hill mines to the Lehigh Canal, with mules riding along to haul the empties back up. In 1844 engineers added back-tracks and inclined planes so the whole return trip could also be made by gravity. Once a marvel of early industrial engineering, it later became one of America's first tourist thrill rides—a forerunner of the roller coaster.
Lackawaxen Township, PA · est. 1948
In the reform-charged 1840s, newspaper editor Horace Greeley helped bankroll a utopian community on this ground, inspired by the French socialist Charles Fourier and by New England's Brook Farm. The Sylvania Colony pooled property and shared labor equally, betting that cooperation could build a better society. Killing July frosts wiped out its crops, and the experiment collapsed in 1845.
Emporium, PA · est. 2021
Founded in 1907 in the small mountain town of Emporium, Sylvania Electric grew into a national name in vacuum tubes and electronics. During World War II its workers—largely women—produced vacuum tubes for the proximity fuze, a device that let artillery shells detonate near their targets and dramatically improved accuracy. The reliance on a female workforce led Collier's to dub Emporium "Girls Town USA," and the Poplar Street plant ran until 1990.
Harrisburg, PA · est. 1986
Born in Harrisburg in 1834, T. Morris Chester lived a life that ranged across three continents. He taught in Liberia, recruited Black soldiers for the Union, and reported from the front as one of the only African American war correspondents of the Civil War. Afterward he raised aid for the freedpeople in Europe, was admitted to the English bar, and held prominent offices in Reconstruction-era Louisiana before returning home to die in 1892.
Hamiltonban Township, PA · est. 1967
In 1836, as Pennsylvania threw itself into a canal-and-railroad building spree, the state chartered a rail line through the rugged Adams County countryside, pushed hard by the young Gettysburg lawyer and future Radical Republican Thaddeus Stevens. Critics mocked its winding route through the hills as the "Tapeworm," and the project—never finished as planned—was put up for sale by 1842. Its abandoned granite viaduct still stands nearby as a monument to an overambitious age of internal improvements.
Lansdowne, PA · est. 2015
From her home on Fairview Avenue in Lansdowne, Tatiana Proskouriakoff transformed the study of the ancient Maya. Her breakthrough paper showed that Maya hieroglyphic inscriptions recorded the histories of real rulers, opening a written past that scholars had thought unreadable. Her achievements earned the 1962 Kidder Award and, in 1984, Guatemala's Order of the Quetzal, its highest honor for a foreigner.
Athens Township, PA · est. 1948
Where the Chemung meets the Susquehanna, the ground at Teaoga held generations of Native life long before Pennsylvania had that name. This strategic river junction was a crossroads for various Indigenous peoples, and late-19th-century excavations here brought to light the graves of an Andaste (Susquehannock) chief and his followers. The site is a reminder that the valley's earliest towns were Native towns, positioned to command travel and trade along the great water routes.
Athens Township, PA · est. 1928
Where the Chemung meets the Susquehanna stood Teaoga, a Iroquois watch post guarding the southern approach to the confederacy's territory, and nearby the Delaware settlement remembered as Queen Esther's Town. The broad river flats were rich grazing land, but in September 1778 — amid the frontier warfare of the Revolution — Colonel Thomas Hartley's expedition swept up the valley and burned both towns. These raids were part of the escalating cycle of retaliation between Continental forces and Britain's Iroquois allies on the Pennsylvania frontier.
Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 2005
Teedyuscung, called "King of the Delawares," led the last Delaware and Mahican community in the Wyoming Valley, which he established near here in 1754. Baptized by the Moravians, he stood between the powerful Iroquois and encroaching Connecticut settlers and pressed his people's claims to land at a series of treaty conferences in Easton from 1756 to 1762. He died in 1763 when his cabin burned at this spot.
Pittsburgh, PA
This was the home of Charles "Teenie" Harris, who from the 1930s into the 1970s photographed the everyday life of Pittsburgh's Black community for the Pittsburgh Courier, one of the nation's most influential Black newspapers. Across roughly four decades he made tens of thousands of images — of churches, ballplayers, jazz musicians, weddings, and ordinary neighbors. His lens preserved a world that few other photographers thought to record.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 1967
Thaddeus Kosciuszko was a Polish-born military engineer whose fortifications helped the Continental Army win the Revolution, most famously at Saratoga and West Point. After the war he returned home to lead a doomed uprising for Polish independence, and when exile brought him back to America he lodged in this Philadelphia house in 1797–1798. Here he received visitors including Thomas Jefferson and drafted a will devoting his American assets to freeing and educating enslaved people.
Lancaster, PA · est. 1950
Thaddeus Stevens made Lancaster his home from 1842 until his death in 1868 and lies buried in this cemetery, which he chose because it admitted people of all races. As a congressman he was among the fiercest advocates for abolition, equal rights, and free public schooling, insisting on the "equality of man before his Creator." His epitaph, which he wrote himself, made his lifelong convictions his final statement.
Gettysburg, PA · est. 1954
Before he became one of the most powerful and uncompromising figures in Congress, Thaddeus Stevens lived in Gettysburg, leaving in 1842. Here he built his early career as a lawyer and ironmaster while championing two causes that defined him: the abolition of slavery and the defense of free public schools in Pennsylvania, which he famously fought to preserve in 1835. From these Adams County beginnings he rose to lead the Radical Republicans and shape Reconstruction after the Civil War.
Scranton, PA
In the mid-19th century, northeastern Pennsylvania's anthracite fields ran on ingenious gravity railroads — lines that let loaded coal cars coast downhill by their own weight, with stationary steam engines hauling the empties back up a chain of inclined planes. The Pennsylvania Coal Company's route carried anthracite between the mines around Pittston and the canal at Hawley for more than three decades. This surviving 'Pioneer' car, retired when the gravity line gave way to conventional steam locomotives, was handed over to the City of Scranton in 1909 as a relic of that vanished technology.
Donora, PA · est. 1995
In late October 1948, a temperature inversion trapped industrial fumes over the mill town of Donora, turning a fog into a lethal, acrid smog. Emissions from the local zinc works choked the valley for days, killing about twenty people and sickening thousands before rain finally cleared the air. The disaster shocked the nation and became a rallying cry for regulating what factories could pour into the sky.
Haines Township, PA · est. 1997
This central Pennsylvania village was founded in 1786 by a Jewish immigrant who, in a striking act of generosity, gave land and even a communion set to the Christian congregations of his new community. More than a century and a half later, his example inspired a remarkable gathering: in 1949, tens of thousands of people came here for a day devoted to religious and racial understanding, complete with a vast outdoor pageant staged on a natural hillside. The founder's tolerance had become a symbol for a nation grappling with prejudice after World War II.
Upper Dublin Township, PA · est. 2014
On a farm beside the Upper Dublin Friends Meeting, Quaker abolitionists Thomas and Hannah Atkinson and their neighbors ran a station on the Underground Railroad, sheltering freedom-seekers—some of whom now rest in the meetinghouse cemetery. The family's antislavery conviction was matched by a gift for enterprise: son Wilmer Atkinson founded the influential Farm Journal in 1877. Circulated nationally, the magazine became a trusted source of practical knowledge and advocacy for American farm families.
Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 2000
This grand French Chateau-style structure began life in 1890 as the Bryn Mawr Hotel, a summer resort built for the Pennsylvania Railroad and designed by the celebrated architect Frank Furness — his last surviving building of its kind. In 1896 the Baldwin School, a girls' preparatory academy founded in 1888, leased the building, and by 1922 it owned the property outright. The transformation from railroad resort to respected school mirrored the rise of serious academic education for young women.
Latrobe, PA · est. 2013
By the turn of the twentieth century, steamships and railroads had made the once-exotic banana a cheap, everyday fruit in American cities and towns. In 1904, a young apprentice pharmacist named David Strickler put that abundance to delicious use at the Tassell Pharmacy soda fountain here in Latrobe, splitting a banana lengthwise and dressing it with ice cream. He is even credited with designing the boat-shaped dish that still holds the treat today.
Tredyffrin Township, PA · est. 1951
In 1711, Welsh families who had crossed the Atlantic seeking room to worship freely gathered in the fertile Chester County countryside known as the Great Valley and organized a Baptist congregation. It became the second oldest Baptist church in Pennsylvania and, over time, the "mother" from which eight neighboring congregations grew. The present stone meetinghouse, the second on the site, was raised in 1805.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 1996
Philadelphia gave the American stage its most celebrated dynasty: Lionel, Ethel, and John Barrymore, the dazzling third generation of a theatrical family often called the "Royal Family of the American Stage." Their grandparents, the Drews, ran the storied Arch Street Theatre here, steeping the children in footlights from birth. The three siblings carried the family gift from live theater into the new worlds of film and radio across the first half of the 20th century.
Schellsburg, PA · est. 2012
In 1910, as the Progressive Era's faith in applied science reached into rural life, Bedford County opened one of the country's first cooperative extension offices in the small town of Schellsburg, with A. B. Ross serving as its county agent. The idea was radical in its simplicity: send a trained expert to teach working farmers the new agricultural science and lift their yields. The model spread until nearly every county in America had an extension office, carrying practical knowledge on crops, 4-H, and home economics to millions.
Brady Township, PA · est. 1950
Where two great Indian paths met — the Great Shamokin running toward Kittanning and the trail to Venango, now Franklin — travelers found a reliable spring and a natural camping ground. Generations used this junction as a resting place in the deep forests of central Pennsylvania. During the War of 1812, Major McClelland's militia force also camped at this spot, following the same well-worn crossroads that Native peoples had long relied upon.
Wyoming, PA · est. 1962
On the night of July 3, 1778, the day after the Battle of Wyoming, this rock became the scene of one of the Revolution's grim atrocities. Fourteen or more captured American soldiers were killed here, according to tradition by a woman remembered as "Queen Esther," though her identity has never been certain. The battle and its aftermath spread terror through the Susquehanna frontier and hardened the war on the Pennsylvania borderlands.
Sunbury, PA · est. 1967
During the French and Indian War, the Susquehanna frontier was a dangerous borderland where British colonists, French forces, and Native nations contested the land. From the garrison at nearby Fort Augusta, soldiers ventured out at their peril; here, one man is said to have been killed, his blood coloring the spring that gave the place its grim name. The story preserves the fear and violence that hung over Pennsylvania's backcountry in those years.
Smethport, PA · est. 1949
When the Civil War broke out in April 1861, Col. Thomas L. Kane rallied about 100 volunteers who gathered at Smethport on the 24th before marching off to Harrisburg. These backwoods marksmen pinned tails of buck deer to their caps as a badge of identity, giving rise to the celebrated nickname "the Bucktails." They formed the core of the famed 42nd Pennsylvania Regiment, which earned a reputation as some of the Union's finest sharpshooters.
Driftwood, PA · est. 1950
When the Civil War broke out in the spring of 1861, hardy woodsmen and hunters from Pennsylvania's northern mountains answered the call, famously pinning deer tails to their caps as a badge of their marksmanship. From this point along the Sinnemahoning they set off in April 1861 for Harrisburg to be mustered into service as the men who would become known as the Bucktails. A nearby monument, a state highway, and a state park all keep their name alive.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2002
Established in 1855, the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia was the first hospital in the nation devoted entirely to the care of children. Over the decades it became a proving ground for pediatric medicine, developing lifesaving vaccines, pioneering newborn surgical techniques, and advancing treatment for childhood cancer. Its founding reflected a growing 19th-century conviction that children's health deserved dedicated, specialized care.
Sadsbury Township, PA · est. 1998
In September 1851, the new Fugitive Slave Act collided with a determined free Black community in the Lancaster County countryside. When a Maryland slaveholder came to seize men who had escaped bondage, neighbors rallied to the home of William Parker, and in the violence that followed the slaveholder was killed. The resulting treason trials drew national attention and hardened opinion on both sides of the slavery question.
South Middleton Township, PA · est. 2014
From an 1886 house in the rolling country south of Carlisle came a remarkable American family whose lives orbited the natural world. Brothers Frank and Eugene Craighead earned national reputations as entomologists, and Frank's twin sons carried the work into wild landscapes—studying and helping save Yellowstone's grizzly bears, championing falconry, and lending their voices to the movement that became the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. The family's most famous member, Jean Craighead George, turned that same intimacy with nature into beloved books like 'Julie of the Wolves' and 'My Side of the Mountain.'
Emlenton, PA · est. 2014
The Crawford family helped build the oil and gas industry that grew out of western Pennsylvania's fields. Eben Crawford ran an iron foundry and was an early oil and gas producer, and in 1926 his sons George and Fred organized the Columbia Gas and Electric Corporation, which became the world's largest integrated natural gas company. Cousin Harry Crawford became the first president of Quaker State Oil Refining.
Brooklyn Township, PA · est. 2015
In 1793, Prince Perkins, a free African American veteran of the Revolutionary War, came from Connecticut to settle this land in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania, and his descendants have held it for more than two centuries. His granddaughter Angeline Perkins Dennis and her husband Henry expanded the farm, sustaining a rare, lasting Black landholding in an integrated rural community. The property offers a window into free African American settlement and the strong antislavery currents that ran through this corner of Pennsylvania.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017
First formed in 1928, the Dixie Hummingbirds became one of the most influential African American gospel groups in the country, their tight harmonies and dynamic delivery echoing through the work of artists like James Brown, Stevie Wonder, and the Temptations. Their recording of Paul Simon's "Loves Me Like a Rock" won a Grammy in 1974, and the group received a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage Fellowship in 2000. Founder James B. Davis lived in this Philadelphia home, which doubled as the group's headquarters.
Plumstead Township, PA · est. 2005
During the American Revolution, the Doan family of Plumstead Township turned outlaw, spying for the British and trafficking stolen horses to their army even as the war raged around them. In 1781 they robbed the Bucks County treasury, and in 1783 the Pennsylvania government formally declared six of them outlaws for a string of robberies and burglaries. The gang met a violent end: their leader Moses was killed in a shootout, two brothers were hanged, and the rest fled or vanished, with several buried nearby.
Shenandoah, PA · est. 1991
The coal town of Shenandoah in Pennsylvania's anthracite region gave American music two of its brightest stars: trombonist Tommy Dorsey and saxophonist Jimmy Dorsey. Growing up here in the early 1900s, the brothers learned their craft young and rode the swing craze to national fame, leading the tight, danceable orchestras that defined the big band era. Their bands launched other careers too—a young Frank Sinatra sang out front for Tommy in the early 1940s before going solo.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 1992
The Dunbar Theatre was built by Black bankers in Philadelphia and became home to the Lafayette Players, a celebrated troupe of Black vaudeville and dramatic performers. Later sold to white owners and renamed the Lincoln, it continued to host major Black entertainers from the 1920s into the 1940s. It stood as a cornerstone of African American cultural life during the era of the Harlem Renaissance and the Great Migration.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2024
Ona Judge was brought to Philadelphia as an enslaved servant of Martha Washington while the city served as the young nation's capital. In May 1796 she slipped away from the President's House and made her way to New Hampshire, aided by Philadelphia's free Black community. Even the president's efforts to reclaim her failed, as federal officials declined to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act on his behalf, and Judge lived out her life in freedom.
Allen Township, PA · est. 1925
This marker follows the route of the 1737 "Walking Purchase," the day-and-a-half walk from Wrightstown that Pennsylvania's proprietors used to lay claim to a vast swath of Lenape land. Edward Marshall and his fellow walkers pressed nearly to present Mauch Chunk, passing Hockendauqua Indian Town on the way; a formal survey line was run afterward by Surveyor General Benjamin Eastburn. The lands taken stretched far beyond anything the Delaware believed they had agreed to.
Newtown, PA · est. 2001
In 1960, the Lavelle Aircraft Corporation built TIROS 1 here, the world's first experimental and operational weather satellite. Pioneering satellite television techniques, TIROS relayed the first TV image made from space, opening a new window on Earth's clouds and storms. Its success led to a line of improved satellites that transformed the science of meteorology.
Quakertown, PA · est. 2003
The young United States was still testing whether ordinary citizens would accept federal power, and in 1799 Pennsylvania-German farmers gave their answer. Angered by a 1798 federal tax assessed on houses, they took up arms in what became known as the Fries Rebellion, until soldiers were sent to put it down. Its leader, John Fries, was tried and condemned for treason, then pardoned by President John Adams.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2008
Founded the day after Christmas in 1764, the German Society of Pennsylvania is the oldest German American organization in the country, created to give newly arrived German immigrants legal aid, welfare, and help with the English-speaking world around them. Over time it built a library that grew into one of the largest German-language collections in America, prized by scholars worldwide. The Society settled into its present Philadelphia home in 1888 and still teaches the language and celebrates the culture.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 1997
In 1748 anxious Philadelphians, organized into a volunteer defense force called the Association, threw up the colony's largest fortification along the Delaware River, bristling first with 27 and soon some 50 guns. The battery guarded the river approaches to a Quaker city that had long resisted maintaining a standing military. Decades later the same strategic riverbank hosted the first Philadelphia Navy Yard from 1800 to 1875.
Limestone Township, PA · est. 1959
Just weeks after Edwin Drake struck oil in 1859, J.L. Grandin gambled on the boom by drilling the second well sunk deliberately for oil, at a spring across the river from this spot. The bit came up dry. That failure was an early, sobering lesson that the new oil business promised fortunes but delivered them unevenly, with dry holes as common as gushers.
Woodward Township, PA · est. 1949
Long before survey lines cut across Pennsylvania, the Great Island in the West Branch of the Susquehanna was a crossroads of Native life, where trails funneling in from the Genesee, Ohio, Potomac, and North Branch country met at a fertile river islet. Successive nations camped, farmed, and traded here, and in the turbulent mid-1700s Delaware and Shawnee peoples paused on this ground during their forced drift westward ahead of colonial expansion. The island's braided paths made it one of the great natural gathering points of the interior.
Braddock, PA · est. 1994
By 1919 the mills around Braddock were the beating heart of American steel, and that autumn more than 350,000 workers walked off the job in the largest strike the nation had yet seen. Immigrant laborers demanding union recognition and an end to the grueling twelve-hour day found an ally in Rev. Adalbert Kazincy of St. Michael's, who opened his church as a rallying place when public halls were closed to them. After fifteen bitter weeks the strike collapsed, and organized labor in steel would not recover for another generation.
West Goshen Township, PA · est. 1925
Long before roads crossed this country, a great Indian path ran from the Susquehanna to the Schuylkill, carrying the Minquas or Susquehannock people on their wars and their commerce. Along it flowed a fortune in beaver pelts, thousands each year hauled down the "Beversrede" to the Dutch and Swedish traders on the Delaware. The trail was a highway of the fur trade that first tied the interior nations to European markets on the coast.
Hellam Township, PA · est. 2023
In the boom years after World War II, when the American roadside was becoming a theater of eye-catching commerce, shoe salesman Mahlon Haines built a five-story guesthouse in the literal shape of a work boot to advertise his chain of stores. It stands as a playful example of "programmatic" or novelty architecture—buildings molded into objects to catch a driver's eye—and its perch along the old Lincoln Highway made it a beloved landmark of that coast-to-coast route. Haines, ever the showman, let honeymooners and elderly guests stay for free.
Whitemarsh Township, PA · est. 2023
In 1796, as Philadelphia endured recurring waves of deadly yellow fever, merchant and state senator Anthony Morris built this fieldstone estate outside the city as a country refuge for his family. Its late Georgian mansion—designed by the Philadelphia figure Timothy Matlack—anchored an original 200-acre property that passed through the Sheaff family for a century before Caroline Sinkler acquired it in 1917 and gave it Colonial Revival updates. The house layers more than a century of American taste, from Federal-era elegance to early-twentieth-century revivalism.
Leechburg, PA
This wooden footbridge over the Kiskiminetas River carried pedestrians between Leechburg and the Hyde Park neighborhood, resting on stone piers left behind by the Pennsylvania Railroad's East Leechburg Bridge. It was engineered in 1920 by the John A. Roebling's Sons Co. of Trenton — the same storied firm whose wire-rope work made the Brooklyn Bridge possible. When the catastrophic St. Patrick's Day Flood of March 1936 swept through the Allegheny and Kiskiminetas valleys, it tore the span away, and the community rebuilt it the following year.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017
Organized in 1865, the Jewish Hospital was the first in Pennsylvania founded and funded by Jewish Philadelphians to care for their own community — though its doors were open to all. It rose as the city's Jewish population swelled with families fleeing upheaval in the German states, offering kosher food and religious observance that other hospitals could not. In 1952 it was renamed the Albert Einstein Medical Center, a name it carries into the present.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 1995
Built in 1768 for John Johnson, this stone house in Germantown sheltered three generations of a Quaker family who devoted themselves to abolishing slavery and aiding freed African Americans. By the 1850s it served as a station on the Underground Railroad, where freedom seekers found refuge in the house and its outbuildings as they made their way north. It stands today as a rare surviving Underground Railroad site with a documented Quaker antislavery legacy.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2012
On this Philadelphia ground stood the home John B. Kelly built for a family that would become American royalty of a sort. "Jack" Kelly rose from a bricklaying trade to business success and city politics, and won three Olympic gold medals in rowing in the 1920s; his son "Kell" carried the sculling tradition to Henley and the 1956 Olympics. His daughter Grace became an Academy Award-winning actress and then, as Princess of Monaco, a genuine princess — turning a striving Irish-American clan into a mid-century legend.
Leechburg, PA
In 1864, as the Civil War raged, the people of Leechburg embraced the era's "Rural Cemetery Movement"—a mid-19th-century reform that moved burials out of crowded churchyards and town lots into landscaped, park-like grounds meant for quiet reflection. Land obtained from John Klingensmith and Addison Leech (whose family gave the town its name) became the new resting place, and the remains from the original cemetery along 2nd Street were relocated here. The grounds also became home to the John A. Hunter Post #123 of the Grand Army of the Republic, the fraternal order of Union Civil War veterans, tying the site directly to the generation that fought the war.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2003
Built in 1865 as a mansion for wealthy Philadelphia businessmen and their families, this North Broad Street building later served as a Moose Lodge headquarters from 1912. By the 1960s the Blue Horizon had become a hub of African American community life and a boxing venue of worldwide renown, its intimate, roaring hall drawing fighters and fans from far beyond the city.
Glendon, PA · est. 1995
Dug between 1827 and 1829, the Lehigh Canal ran 47 miles from Mauch Chunk to Easton, where it met the Delaware Canal to Philadelphia and the Morris Canal to New York. It was a vital artery for hauling anthracite coal out of Pennsylvania's hard-coal region, fueling the rise of the anthracite iron industry that powered the young nation's growth. The canal ran in full operation until 1932, and this restored section reopened in 1976.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2009
In 1855, an enslaved woman named Jane Johnson and her two sons seized their freedom as their owner brought them through Philadelphia, aided by abolitionists William Still and Passmore Williamson and the Underground Railroad network. Williamson's refusal to produce them landed him in jail, and the resulting trial became a national sensation. The family eventually settled in Boston, free.
East Fallowfield Township, PA · est. 2006
On August 13, 1911, Zachariah Walker, a Black steelworker accused of killing a white security guard, was seized from a hospital bed and burned to death by a mob near this spot. Fifteen local men and boys were indicted for the crime, yet every one was acquitted. The horror provoked outrage across the country and helped galvanize the NAACP's national anti-lynching campaign, ultimately inspiring Pennsylvania's 1923 anti-lynching law.
New Garden Township, PA · est. 1926
This line marks the edge of the Manor of Steyning, a 15,500-acre tract William Penn patented to his daughter Laetitia in 1701 for the token yearly rent of a single beaver skin and "fatherly love." Beside it lay a companion tract granted to his son William Penn Jr. in 1706. Such proprietary manors were how the Penn family reserved and parceled great blocks of colonial Pennsylvania among their heirs.
Mount Pleasant Township, PA · est. 1967
Drilled in 1882, the McGugin well tapped what was then reported as the greatest flow of natural gas in the world, and its output was soon piped east to fuel Pittsburgh's homes and factories. The strike helped ignite the development of the oil and gas fields of southwestern Pennsylvania, a region that became central to America's early energy industry. It marked a moment when Pennsylvania's underground riches began powering an industrializing nation.