2,561 markers in the database — showing 241–300.
Birmingham Township, PA · est. 1915
This Quaker meeting house, raised in 1783, sits amid the ground fought over at the Battle of Brandywine on September 11, 1777. In the aftermath of that Revolutionary clash — the largest single-day land battle of the war — the building served as a hospital for the wounded. Its plain stone walls tie the peace testimony of the Society of Friends to the violence that swept across Chester County.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2026
On June 14, 1775, the Second Continental Congress, meeting at Independence Hall in Philadelphia, voted to bring the scattered colonial militias together into a single Continental Army. That decision created the first national military force of what would become the United States, more than a year before independence was formally declared. From it descends today's U.S. Army, the oldest and largest branch of the armed forces.
Seven Valleys, PA · est. 2012
In 1851 C. Jacob Fussell built a factory near here to turn the surplus milk and cream of York County's dairy farmers into ice cream—the first time the treat was mass-produced for commercial sale in the United States. The nearby Northern Central Railroad carried his product straight to the Baltimore market. After Fussell relocated to Baltimore, local makers kept the trade alive into the 1940s.
Jermyn, PA
In the hard and dangerous world of anthracite coal mining, an injured miner far from any doctor often had little chance. On October 25, 1899, at the Jermyn Colliery, physician Matthew J. Shields and the Hudson Coal Company are credited with founding organized first-aid training in America — teaching miners to treat wounds and steady the injured before help could arrive. The idea spread from these coal patches to mines, factories, and eventually households across the country.
Meadville, PA
On September 9, 1842, Crawford County Democrats did something new: instead of letting party insiders pick candidates in a caucus, they let ordinary members vote directly on their nominees. Republicans adopted the method here in 1860, and the "Crawford County System" slowly spread from county to county and state to state. By the early twentieth century, the direct primary had become the standard way Americans chose their party nominees.
Scranton, PA
This memorial honors Bishop Franciszek Hodur (1866–1953), the organizer and first Prime Bishop of the Polish National Catholic Church, which took root among Scranton's Polish immigrant community at the close of the 19th century. Hodur led a congregation of largely Polish coal-country immigrants who sought a church governed in their own language and by their own people. Scranton became the movement's spiritual center and remains so today.
West Mead Township, PA
James Mills Thoburn belonged to the great nineteenth-century wave of American Methodist missionaries who fanned out across the globe, and few traveled farther or stayed longer than he did. From 1859 he spent nearly half a century in India, South Asia, and the Philippines, an era when Western churches poured people and money into overseas missions that founded schools, presses, and congregations abroad. When his working life ended in 1908 he came home to the quiet college town of Meadville, in the hills of northwestern Pennsylvania, where he lived out his final years until his death in 1922. He rests nearby in Greendale Cemetery.
Peters Township, PA · est. 2013
In 1765, on the frontier west of here, a band of settlers known as "The Black Boys"—led by James Smith—clashed with British troops from Fort Loudon over the reopening of trade with Native peoples. Still raw from recent frontier attacks, the settlers disguised themselves and repeatedly disrupted British supply trains bound for the western forts; in one skirmish colonist James Brown was wounded. Many consider this defiance the first armed resistance to British authority in the colonies.
York, PA · est. 1949
When York was surveyed and laid out in 1741 under the proprietorship of William Penn's sons, Baltzer Spengler was rewarded for his work on the town plan with this very lot. In time an old tavern rose on the spot, one of the gathering places that gave the young town its social and civic life. Taverns like this were the crossroads of colonial Pennsylvania, where travelers rested and townsfolk traded news.
Carlisle, PA · est. 1949
This site held the home of General Ephraim Blaine, who as Commissary General kept the Continental Army fed through some of the Revolution's hardest campaigns — a thankless logistical task on which victory quietly depended. Years later, in October 1794, Blaine hosted President George Washington for a week here while Washington gathered a militia army at Carlisle to march against the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania. It is a rare double witness to the war for independence and the young republic's first great test of federal authority.
Hollidaysburg, PA · est. 1982
Formed in 1846 and named for the prominent citizen John Blair, this county sits in the Allegheny highlands with Hollidaysburg as its seat. Its fortunes were transformed by the coming of the railroad: the city of Altoona, founded in 1849, grew into one of the great railroad centers of America. There the Pennsylvania Railroad built vast shops that employed generations of workers.
Allegheny Township, PA · est. 1947
Thomas Blair built his stone house here in 1785, in the years just after the Revolution when settlers were pressing into the ridges and valleys of central Pennsylvania. The homestead passed to his son John Blair, who became a leading citizen of the area. When a new county was carved out in 1846, it was named Blair in the family's honor.
Kittanning Township, PA
During the French and Indian War, Pennsylvania's frontier was raided repeatedly by warriors based at Kittanning, a Delaware (Lenape) town on the Allegheny River. In September 1756, Lt. Col. John Armstrong led a force of provincial soldiers on a bold overland strike against the town, and this rise marked one of their stopping points on the march. The expedition destroyed Kittanning, and tradition holds the hill took its name from the blankets the men discarded here as they moved fast toward their objective.
Hepburn Township, PA · est. 1931
Beginning in 1805, German colonists seeking religious freedom settled this Lycoming County valley, and in 1828 they built the Blooming Grove Dunkard (German Baptist Brethren) meeting house. Led by Dr. Frederick Haller, families such as the Heims, Ulmers, and Kiesses established a close-knit community of faith. The marker preserves the names of those founding households.
East Hanover Township, PA · est. 1949
As frontier violence flared along the Blue Mountain in the 1750s and 1760s, Pennsylvania's colonial government paid volunteer companies to shield its exposed settlers. A chain of six fortified loghouse stations stretched roughly twenty-three miles from Fort Hunter on the Susquehanna to the Swatara Creek, garrisoned in 1763–64 by the Paxton Rangers, echoing an earlier defensive line held in 1756–57. These crude forts marked the raw, contested edge of British settlement during the French and Indian War and Pontiac's uprising.
Manchester Township, PA · est. 1998
Bob Hoffman founded the York Barbell Company in 1932 and built York, Pennsylvania, into a national center of weightlifting. Dubbed the "Father of World Weightlifting," he coached the U.S. Olympic team from 1948 to 1964 and promoted powerlifting and bodybuilding as the fitness movement grew. He even advised Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Nixon on youth physical fitness.
Upper Macungie Township, PA
Robert "Bob" Rodale (1930–1990) turned his family's Pennsylvania publishing house, Rodale Inc., into a national voice for organic gardening, preventive health, and physical fitness through magazines like Prevention and Organic Gardening. A committed advocate of cycling, active living, and what he championed as "regenerative" agriculture, he worked from the Lehigh Valley for decades until his death in 1990. Set in the countryside near his Emmaus base of operations, this park carries both his name and his belief that shared public spaces renew the bonds of a community.
Pequea Township, PA · est. 1984
Built in 1791 of local limestone, Boehm's Chapel is the oldest surviving structure designed for Methodist worship in Pennsylvania and among the oldest in the country. It rose on land once owned by Bishop Martin Boehm, a co-founder of the United Brethren in Christ, and drew visits from Bishop Francis Asbury, remembered as the father of American Methodism. The chapel dates to the very first years of the young republic, when American denominations were organizing themselves.
Buckingham Township, PA · est. 2003
Colonial taverns were more than watering holes — they were the meeting halls where revolution was organized in plain sight. Licensed in 1763, Bogart's Tavern became the headquarters of Bucks County's Committee of Observation and Inspection, the local engine of the resistance in 1775 and 1776. It was here that the county's first Revolutionary military companies mustered, and General Nathanael Greene made it his headquarters in 1776.
Napier Township, PA · est. 1992
Standing where the Forbes and Burd Roads met, Bonnet Tavern welcomed travelers on the rough frontier routes west from 1779 under Jean Bonnet and his heirs. In mid-1794 it became a flashpoint of the Whiskey Rebellion, as angry farmers gathered here and raised a liberty pole to defy the new federal excise tax on whiskey. That October, the troops President Washington summoned to put down the uprising camped at the tavern on their march westward.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 2017
Opened in Philadelphia in 1971, the Booth Maternity Center reimagined how American women gave birth, offering natural, family-centered childbirth at a time when hospital delivery was usually clinical and impersonal. It became a national model for training midwives and for pairing them with physicians, and it helped pioneer the now-common practice of letting family members support a woman through labor and delivery. Booth also pushed for the accreditation of birth centers before closing in 1989.
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1992
Completed in early 1892, the Bost Building became the nerve center of one of the most consequential labor battles in American history. That summer it housed the strike committee of the Amalgamated Association of Iron & Steel Workers, and the telegraph wires strung into it carried dispatches from journalists covering the Homestead Strike to newspapers nationwide. From this address, the workers' cause was argued to the wider public even as the confrontation with Carnegie Steel turned violent.
Penn Hills, PA · est. 1946
In 1758, British and colonial forces under General John Forbes cut a road across Pennsylvania to strike at French-held Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio. Bouquet Camp served as a supply base along that campaign, named for Colonel Henry Bouquet, Forbes's able second-in-command and the builder of the Forbes Road. The French abandoned and burned Fort Duquesne rather than face the advancing army, opening the gateway to the Ohio Country.
Scott Township, PA · est. 1996
In the summer of 1794, the hills southwest of Pittsburgh became a flashpoint in the young republic's first great test of federal authority. Angry over Alexander Hamilton's excise tax on distilled spirits — a hardship for cash-poor frontier farmers who turned grain into whiskey — armed settlers besieged the home of tax inspector General John Neville. Over two days of fighting, Neville's mansion was put to the torch and men fell on both sides, forcing President Washington to eventually lead troops west to restore order.
Williamsport, PA · est. 2000
When Bowman Field opened in 1926 as Memorial Field, minor league baseball was a fixture of nearly every American town, and Williamsport's new park quickly earned its place in the game's lore. Its very first professional contest pitted the Williamsport Grays against the Harrisburg Giants of the Negro leagues — a reminder that Black professional baseball drew crowds and talent in an era of segregation. Renamed in 1929 for J. Walton Bowman, the ballpark went on to host home teams and major league exhibition clubs for generations.
Boyertown, PA · est. 2009
Founded in Boyertown in 1893 by C. A. Mory and associates, the Boyertown Burial Casket Company grew into one of the largest casket makers in the world and among the first in its trade listed on the New York and Philadelphia stock exchanges. Renowned for craftsmanship, it patented numerous design innovations and used progressive marketing to build an international market. The firm was sold in 1987, closed in 1988, and its factory was later demolished.
Shippensburg, PA · est. 1961
In 1755, as General Edward Braddock's army marched toward the French at Fort Duquesne, supplies for the expedition were stockpiled in Edward Shippen's stout stone house at Shippensburg. His son-in-law James Burd cut a road westward to move those provisions toward the front. After Braddock's crushing defeat, the goods that remained were handed out to settlers fleeing Indian raids along the exposed Pennsylvania frontier.
Wharton Township, PA · est. 1946
In July 1755, British General Edward Braddock led a large expedition toward the French-held forks of the Ohio and met catastrophe near the Monongahela, where he was mortally wounded. His men buried him in the roadbed here so passing wagons would hide the grave from pursuing enemies. His remains were reinterred nearby in 1804, and a trace of the military road he cut through the wilderness can still be seen.
North Union Township, PA · est. 1952
In the summer of 1755, General Edward Braddock cut a military road westward through the Pennsylvania mountains toward the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne, and Colonel Thomas Dunbar's detachment made its last camp near this point while hauling the army's heavy baggage. When Braddock's main column was shattered in ambush near the Monongahela, the survivors streamed back to Dunbar's position. Rather than regroup, Dunbar destroyed his supplies and retreated, abandoning the frontier to the French and their allies.
North Union Township, PA · est. 1952
On June 26, 1755, General Braddock's army pitched its tenth camp near a landmark called the Half King's Rock as it pushed toward Fort Duquesne. The rock honored Tanacharisson, the Iroquois "half king" who spoke for the Ohio nations and had allied himself with the British. A young George Washington had met Tanacharisson at this very spot in 1754, on the eve of the frontier clashes that helped ignite the French and Indian War.
Dunbar Township, PA · est. 1952
By late June 1755, General Braddock's army had reached its twelfth camp near the Youghiogheny River as it labored toward the French position at Fort Duquesne. On June 30 the troops forded the river at Stewart's Crossing, a well-known frontier fording place near present-day Connellsville. The crossing was one more grueling stage in an expedition that had to carve a wagon road through the wilderness as it advanced.
Henry Clay Township, PA · est. 1952
On June 24, 1755, General Braddock's army made its eighth camp here as it struggled toward Fort Duquesne, with Chestnut Ridge — the last mountain barrier before the descent toward the Ohio — looming on the western horizon. To move supply wagons and artillery over the ridge, Braddock's axemen widened an existing Indian path into a rough military road. It was slow, backbreaking work that set the army's crawling pace.
West Mifflin, PA · est. 1964
About midday on July 9, 1755, General Edward Braddock's British army of some 1,300 men forded the Monongahela here on its march to drive the French from Fort Duquesne. Hours later that expedition was shattered in the woods beyond, Braddock mortally wounded and his troops routed by a smaller force of French and their Native allies. The battered survivors—among them a young officer named George Washington—recrossed the river in retreat.
North Braddock, PA · est. 1948
On July 9, 1755, a British column under General Edward Braddock marched through this ground toward the French stronghold of Fort Duquesne at the forks of the Ohio. A smaller force of French soldiers and their Native allies caught the redcoats in the woods and shattered them, killing Braddock and sending the survivors reeling in retreat. The disaster was one of the worst British defeats of the French and Indian War — and a young colonial aide named George Washington helped rally the broken army.
North Braddock, PA · est. 1994
In the summer of 1794, farmers across western Pennsylvania rose up against a federal excise tax on whiskey — the cash crop of the frontier — in what became the young republic's gravest test of federal authority. Here at Braddock's Field, thousands of armed militiamen from the four western counties massed on August 1–2 in a show of force that stopped just short of open war. Their gathering, the largest armed defiance of the national government before the Civil War, pushed President Washington to raise a militia army and march west to restore order.
Towanda, PA · est. 1982
Formed in 1810 and first called Ontario County, this region was renamed in 1812 for William Bradford, the second U.S. Attorney General. Its seat, Towanda, was incorporated in 1828 along the Susquehanna. The county remembers Sullivan's March—the 1779 Revolutionary campaign against the Iroquois that passed through the valley—and native son David Wilmot, whose 1846 Proviso to bar slavery from new territories helped ignite the national crisis over slavery.
Washington, PA · est. 1953
David Bradford built this fine stone house in 1788, and six years later he emerged as a leading figure in the Whiskey Rebellion, the armed uprising of western Pennsylvania farmers against the federal excise tax on distilled spirits. When President Washington sent a militia army to enforce the law, the rebellion collapsed and Bradford fled to Spanish West Florida to escape prosecution. His abandoned home stands as a monument to one of the young republic's first great tests of federal authority.
Bradford, PA · est. 2006
Northwestern Pennsylvania was the cradle of the world's oil industry, and in 1881 independent oilmen Robert Childs, Eli Loomis, and William Willis founded a refinery near here to process the region's prized Pennsylvania Grade crude. It began modestly at ten barrels a day; more than a century later it was refining thousands of barrels daily, drawing from wells across the surrounding hills. It remains among the oldest continuously operating refineries in the United States.
Brady Township, PA
This great bend of the Allegheny River bears the name of Captain Samuel Brady (1756–1795), a frontier scout whose exploits grew into legend. In June 1779, in what was then Seneca country, Brady led a party to answer the killing of a settler and her four children and the capture of two more. His force surrounded a small band of Seneca and Munsee, killed their Munsee leader, and freed the two captive children.
Bradys Bend Township, PA
For a third of the nineteenth century, the bend of the Allegheny River at Brady's Bend roared with the work of one of America's great early ironworks. Founded in 1839 as the Great Western and later reorganized as the Brady's Bend Iron Company, it grew into one of the largest iron operations of its era, drawing on the coal and iron ore of western Pennsylvania. Most remarkably, it became the first works to roll iron rails on the western side of the Allegheny Mountains — feeding the very railroads that were then stitching the growing nation together. When it closed in 1873, it left behind a company town and the memory of a place where American heavy industry came of age beyond the eastern seaboard.
Birmingham Township, PA · est. 2001
On September 11, 1777, the rolling farmland around Birmingham Township became the stage for the largest single-day battle of the Revolutionary War. Washington's Continentals tried to hold the fords of the Brandywine against Sir William Howe's advancing British and Hessian troops, but a wide flanking march turned the American position and opened the road to Philadelphia. The Commonwealth Treasure designation recognizes this preserved ground as hallowed to the founding struggle.
Coatesville, PA · est. 1985
This Chester County house passed through several early families before becoming linked to the Brandywine Iron Works. When Dr. Charles Lukens died in 1825, his widow Rebecca took over the struggling mill rather than let it fail. Running the ironworks until her death in 1854, she built a reputation for shrewd management and vision that was extraordinary for a woman of her era.
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.
Bethlehem, PA · est. 1964
The Moravians who founded Bethlehem built this stone house in 1748 to lodge their unmarried men, and it quickly became a hive of colonial-era craft — a bell foundry, silkworm raising, and other trades that made the community largely self-sufficient. During the Revolution it sheltered wounded Continental soldiers as a military hospital, and after 1815 it opened as a girls' school before becoming part of Moravian College and a museum.
Shrewsbury Township, PA
Dating to about 1871, this York County bridge survives from the height of the industrial era, when Pennsylvania's growing network of roads and rail lines demanded sturdy new crossings over its many streams. Its listing on the National Register of Historic Places recognizes both its age and its engineering as a document of nineteenth-century transportation. Structures like it carried the everyday traffic that connected rural communities to markets and mills.
Bridgeport, PA
This memorial rose in the small industrial borough of Bridgeport, tucked along the Schuylkill River across from Norristown in southeastern Pennsylvania. It was dedicated on Memorial Day of 1976 — the nation's Bicentennial year — a moment when countless American towns paused to honor their own who had worn the uniform. Rather than singling out one war or one soldier, the community chose to remember every local man and woman who served the nation, in peacetime garrisons and on distant battlefields alike, the living alongside the dead.
Bristol Township, PA · est. 1949
Laid out in 1697 as Buckingham and chartered in 1720, Bristol grew up as a river port on the Delaware, one of the oldest boroughs in Pennsylvania. For a time in the early 1700s it served as the seat of Bucks County, and for two centuries it thrived as a hub of travel and trade. Its wharves and roads tied the farms of the interior to the wider Atlantic economy.
Philadelphia, PA · est. 1999
When the Pennsylvania Railroad opened Broad Street Station in 1881 and enlarged it in 1893, it became for a time the world's largest railroad passenger terminal, its great arched train shed a marvel of the age. The long elevated stone viaduct feeding it—nicknamed the "Chinese Wall"—cut across the city until the station and its tracks were finally demolished in 1952–53.
Antrim Township, PA · est. 1966
Built in 1836, this one-room schoolhouse taught generations of rural Franklin County children the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. A single teacher would have managed pupils of every age in one room, heated by a stove, until the building finally closed in 1921. Its long life spans nearly a century of American common schooling before consolidation swept such schools away.
Upper Makefield Township, PA
Brownsburg is a small crossroads village in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, its cluster of early homes and shops preserved as a historic district. Villages like this grew up where country roads met, serving the surrounding farms with the everyday trades of a rural region. Its weathered buildings preserve the look of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Pennsylvania.
Brownsville, PA · est. 1946
Long before it was Brownsville, this bluff above the Monongahela was called Redstone Old Fort. The Ohio Company built a storehouse here in 1754, and Fort Burd rose in 1759 during the struggle for the Ohio country. The site sat astride a succession of great routes west — Nemacolin's Trail, Burd's Road, and eventually the National Road.
Catasauqua, PA · est. 2014
Founded in 1882 in the ironmaking town of Catasauqua, the Bryden Horse Shoe Works grew into one of the largest horseshoe plants in the world. Using George Bryden's patented process, it turned out shoes of such quality that demand reached across the globe—including thousands supplied to the British War Department during and after the Boer War. As the age of horsepower gave way to machines, the firm became the Phoenix Manufacturing Co. in 1928 and shifted to commercial forging.
Bryn Athyn, PA · est. 1947
Bryn Athyn Cathedral is the architectural centerpiece of the Swedenborgian church community, its buildings modeled on 14th-century Gothic and 12th-century Romanesque forms. Endowed by industrialist John Pitcairn in the early 20th century, it was raised in a deliberately medieval fashion by cooperative craft guilds of masons, carpenters, and metalworkers who shaped the stone and glass by hand on site. The result is a rare American revival of guild craftsmanship in an age of the assembly line.
Lower Merion Township, PA · est. 2001
From 1921 to 1938, the campus of Bryn Mawr College hosted a bold experiment: a summer liberal arts school for women who spent their days in factories and workshops. Led by educator Hilda Worthington Smith, it welcomed more than 1,700 students of varied races, ethnicities, and backgrounds, offering wage-earning women the kind of humanities education usually reserved for the privileged. Many graduates went on to become leaders in their unions, communities, and public life.
Licking Township, PA
In the 1840s, the hills of Clarion County rang with the work of the charcoal iron industry, and the cold blast furnace built here in 1844 — named for James Buchanan, the Pennsylvanian who would soon become the nation's fifteenth president — was part of that booming trade. Furnaces like this one smelted local iron ore using heat drawn from vast quantities of charcoal, which meant they devoured the surrounding forests at a staggering rate. By 1858 the nearby timber was exhausted and the furnace fell silent, a common fate that turned many a prosperous ironworks into a quiet ruin in little more than a decade.
Mercersburg, PA · est. 1953
This Mercersburg house holds a double thread of early American history. Here James Buchanan — later a lawyer, diplomat, and the nation's 15th president — spent part of his boyhood from 1796 to 1807 after his birth nearby at Stony Batter. And here, in 1794-95, a young Patrick Gass apprenticed as a carpenter, years before he built the winter quarters that sheltered the Lewis and Clark expedition on its journey to the Pacific.
Brokenstraw Township, PA · est. 1947
Buckaloons stood at the meeting of Brokenstraw Creek and the Allegheny River, a site so long inhabited that excavated burial mounds attest to its deep antiquity. In 1749 the French officer Céloron de Blainville passed through on his expedition to claim the Ohio Valley, and in 1779 the village was destroyed during Colonel Daniel Brodhead's Revolutionary War campaign against the Seneca. Its story spans centuries of Native life along these rivers.
West Chillisquaque Township, PA · est. 1947
Founded by Pennsylvania Baptists in 1846 as the University at Lewisburg, this institution grew along the Susquehanna into a respected center of learning. In 1885 it conferred its first degrees on women students, and the following year it was renamed Bucknell University to honor benefactor William Bucknell, a devoted donor and trustee. From modest religious beginnings it became one of the state's enduring liberal arts universities.
Doylestown, PA · est. 1982
Bucks County was one of the three counties William Penn carved out when he founded Pennsylvania in 1682, taking its name from Buckinghamshire, the English shire many of its early settlers left behind. Penn himself built his country estate, Pennsbury Manor, along the Delaware here, and the county grew into the agricultural heart of his Quaker colony. Doylestown, a crossroads town, was made the county seat in 1812 and incorporated as a borough in 1838.
Buffalo Township, PA · est. 1948
Presbyterian settlers pushing into the Buffalo Valley organized this congregation in 1773, only to see it scattered when frontier warfare swept the West Branch country during the Revolutionary years. The faithful regathered and installed their first settled pastor in 1787, and their humble log meetinghouse of about 1775 gave way to stone in 1816 and brick in 1846. Each rebuilding marked a community putting down deeper roots in a valley it had nearly abandoned.