Historic Markers in Pennsylvania

Factoryville, PA · est. 1998

Christy Mathewson, born in Factoryville in 1880, rose from small-town Pennsylvania and Bucknell University to become one of baseball's greatest pitchers with the New York Giants. Renowned for his sportsmanship in a rough era of the game, he won a National League–record number of games and later served overseas in World War I. In 1936 he was named one of the first five inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1999

Built between 1887 and 1897 as a soaring Gothic Revival church, the Church of the Advocate became a spiritual and political anchor for North Philadelphia's growing African American community after 1930. It hosted major Black Power gatherings in the 1960s and '70s, and in 1974 it made history as the site where the first eleven women were ordained Episcopal priests.

Girard, PA · est. 1974

From 1852 to 1875, the lakeside town of Girard was winter home to Dan Rice, the celebrated clown, satirist, and showman who was arguably America's most famous entertainer before the Civil War. Rice was more than a circus jester—a public figure quoted in the press and courted by politicians—and he donated the nearby Soldiers' Monument, one of the earliest memorials to the Union dead. His home once stood across the way.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1991

Founded in 1921 by R.R. Wright, Sr.—a man born to enslaved parents who rose to prominence as an educator and entrepreneur—this bank served Black customers long shut out of mainstream finance. It weathered the Great Depression that toppled thousands of American banks and grew to open offices across Philadelphia. For its depositors, it meant access to mortgages, loans, and a measure of economic independence.

Bethlehem, PA

This monument rose from the effort of Civil War veterans and their neighbors, erected by members of a local post named for a fallen comrade and by the citizens of Bethlehem. Its dedication to "those who gave their lives to save the Union" marks it as the work of the Grand Army of the Republic era, when aging veterans organized into numbered posts to honor their dead and keep the war's meaning alive. Placed in a Pennsylvania industrial town, it joined countless communities in memorializing the men who never came home.

Bloomfield, PA

In the decades after the Civil War, communities across the North raised monuments to their fallen, and rural county seats like Bloomfield gathered their grief and pride into stone in the courthouse-town square. This monument honors the men of Perry County who marched off to save the Union and did not return. Its closing words—that they gave their lives "that the nation might live"—deliberately echo Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, binding a small Pennsylvania county to the war's larger meaning.

Shohola Township, PA · est. 1993

On July 15, 1864, an Erie Railroad train carrying more than 800 Confederate prisoners and their Union guards toward the prison camp at Elmira, New York, collided head-on with a coal train on the single-track line near Shohola. Dozens of men on both sides were killed in one of the deadliest railroad disasters of the Civil War era. The dead and wounded, prisoner and guard alike, were carried into the little village, whose residents cared for them without regard to which uniform they wore.

Shippen Township, PA · est. 1995

Created in March 1933 to fight Depression-era unemployment, the Civilian Conservation Corps put some three million young men to work on the nation's public lands until 1942. In Pennsylvania alone, nearly 195,000 men served at 114 camps, planting trees, building roads and dams, and fighting fires. Their labor developed Leonard Harrison and Colton Point State Parks overlooking the Pine Creek Gorge here.

Lewis Township, PA · est. 1996

In March 1933, at the depths of the Great Depression, the federal government created the Civilian Conservation Corps to put young men to work on the nation's forests and public lands. Over nine years the CCC enrolled some three million youths nationwide, including nearly 195,000 across 114 camps in Pennsylvania. The 367th company arrived at this Lycoming County site on May 30, 1933, establishing Camp S-126, which housed hundreds of men until it closed in 1936.

Bratton Township, PA

During the depths of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal put hundreds of thousands of unemployed young men to work through the Civilian Conservation Corps, founded in 1933. Enrollees lived in camps and built the trails, shelters, and cabins that still shape America's state and national parks and forests. These cabins in the Pennsylvania countryside are a surviving piece of that effort — hand-built by a generation that found both dignity and a paycheck in conserving the land.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1996

During World War II, roughly 12,000 men who refused to bear arms on grounds of conscience served their country in a different way through the Civilian Public Service program. About one in seven came from Pennsylvania, drawing on the state's deep Quaker, Mennonite, and Church of the Brethren traditions of pacifism. Rather than fight, they staffed mental hospitals, volunteered for medical experiments, fought fires, and labored on farms and in forests.

Clarion, PA

When Pennsylvania carved Clarion County from Armstrong and Venango in 1839, it named the new territory for the river whose clear, bell-like current early travelers likened to a distant clarion horn. The hills here proved rich in the raw materials of the young industrial age: charcoal-fired iron furnaces sprang up across the county, while abundant coal seams and vast timber stands fed a lumbering trade that floated logs downstream to market. The seat town of Clarion took shape quickly, incorporating as a borough by 1841 as the county organized itself around courthouse and commerce.

Jefferson Township, PA · est. 1949

Built in 1845 by Vincent & Himrod and named for the statesman Henry Clay, this Mercer County furnace became a proving ground for American iron-making. In 1846 it achieved the first successful smelting of iron using raw bituminous coal in place of scarce charcoal, and a decade later, in 1856, it demonstrated that rich Lake Superior ore could be worked unmixed. Both breakthroughs pointed the way to the coal-and-ore industry that would soon make western Pennsylvania the heart of American steel. The furnace was abandoned in 1861.

Clearfield, PA · est. 1982

Clearfield County, formed in 1804 from Huntingdon and Lycoming, drew its name from the open 'clear fields' that early travelers found in the wilderness. Through the second half of the 19th century it was a great timber county, its loggers felling the forests and running rafts of logs down the West Branch of the Susquehanna between 1850 and 1901. The county seat, Clearfield, was incorporated in 1840.

Corry, PA · est. 1987

From 1888 to 1928 the Climax plant in Corry turned out more than a thousand geared steam locomotives—rugged, slow-moving engines designed to haul heavy loads up steep, rough, temporary track. Logging railroads across the United States and abroad relied on them to reach timber that conventional locomotives could never touch.

Lock Haven, PA · est. 1982

Clinton County was carved from Lycoming and Centre in 1839 and most likely named for New York's Governor DeWitt Clinton, the champion of the Erie Canal. Its ground carries an older memory: the 1776 'Tiadaghton Declaration of Independence,' when frontier 'Fair Play' settlers reportedly declared their own independence in the same season as the Continental Congress. By the 19th century the county was a busy lumbering center, and Lock Haven, its seat, became a city in 1870.

Lock Haven, PA

This statue honors the men of Clinton County, Pennsylvania, who marched off to preserve the Union during the Civil War. Like hundreds of similar monuments raised across the North in the decades after 1865, it turned a rural county's grief and pride into bronze and stone, naming the local contribution to the nation's costliest conflict. It stands as a permanent civic thank-you to a generation of volunteers.

Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2004

When the Clinton Furnace fired up near here in 1859, it became Pittsburgh's first successful blast furnace for making pig iron, fueled by Connellsville coke. Its success proved a technology that would be scaled up into ever-larger furnaces capable of producing iron in enormous quantities. Operating until 1927, Clinton Furnace helped launch the city's rise as the iron and steel capital of America.

Scranton, PA · est. 2008

On August 1, 1877, the anthracite city of Scranton erupted in violence as armed citizens fired on striking workers, killing four and wounding many, including the mayor. The clash was a local flashpoint of the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, the nationwide upheaval that spread through cities gripped by the depression that began in 1873. Coal miners and laborers here joined a wave of workers demanding relief from wage cuts and hard times.

East Manchester Township, PA · est. 1954

Built in 1765, Codorus Furnace was part of the charcoal-iron industry that turned Pennsylvania's forests and ore beds into a colonial and Revolutionary-era workshop. It was operated during the Revolution by James Smith, a York County lawyer who signed the Declaration of Independence. As the oldest surviving relic of York County's iron trade, the restored stack recalls an age when local furnaces cast the tools, stoves, and munitions of a new nation.

Perry Township, PA · est. 1946

The dome-shaped brick beehive ovens found near here are emblems of a region that once fed the American steel industry. Around 1840, coal from near Connellsville was first baked into coke in ovens of this type, producing the hot, clean-burning fuel that iron and steel making demanded. From 1870 onward, Connellsville coke became indispensable to the mills of Pittsburgh and beyond.

Oil City, PA · est. 2011

Born in the oil-country town of Oil City to Polish immigrant parents, Francis "Gabby" Gabreski became one of America's greatest fighter pilots. Flying in World War II and again in the Korean War, he ranked among the nation's leading aces and, as a squadron commander, passed his hard-won combat tactics on to the pilots under him. His skill and valor earned him high decorations from the United States and its allies.

North Strabane Township, PA · est. 1947

George Morgan was one of the most experienced Indian traders and agents on the early American frontier, and from 1796 to 1810 he made his home on this ground. It was here that Aaron Burr, the former vice president, came calling with a scheme to raise a private venture in the West. Morgan grew alarmed at what he heard and became one of the first to warn President Thomas Jefferson of Burr's designs.

Highspire, PA · est. 1946

From his home "Tinian" on the Susquehanna, Col. James Burd served the frontier in the French and Indian War, helping cut roads for Gen. Edward Braddock's ill-fated 1755 expedition and later commanding at Fort Augusta, a key defensive post upriver at Sunbury. When the Revolution came, the veteran soldier again took up the patriot cause. His house, the marker notes, still stood on the opposite hill.

Kelly Township, PA · est. 1952

John Kelly settled in the Buffalo Valley around 1769 on the Pennsylvania frontier and in 1775 built the log house that still stands nearby, later clad in weatherboard. When the Revolution came he served with distinction under Washington at Trenton and Princeton, the twin winter victories that revived the American cause in 1776–77. He lived on until 1832 and lies buried at Lewisburg.

Delaware Township, PA · est. 1949

Matthew Smith captained a company of Lancaster County militia in one of the Revolution's most grueling feats: Benedict Arnold's midwinter march through the Maine wilderness to attack Quebec in 1775. Surviving that ordeal, he went on to serve in 1779 as Vice-President of the Pennsylvania Council, part of the state's Revolutionary government. He died in 1794 and was buried here in a grave that long went unmarked.

Erie, PA · est. 2001

Erie native Philip Cochran carved out a reputation as one of World War II's most colorful airmen. He first drew notice flying P-40 fighters in North Africa, then commanded the 1st Air Commando Group during the 1944 Allied campaign in Burma, pioneering the use of gliders and light aircraft to insert troops deep behind Japanese lines. A colonel at 33, he earned the Distinguished Service Medal and Britain's Distinguished Service Order—and inspired cartoonist Milton Caniff's characters Flip Corkin and General Philerie.

Waterford, PA · est. 1994

Born in this Erie County town in 1837, Strong Vincent rose to command a Union brigade in the Civil War. On July 2, 1863, at Gettysburg, he acted on his own initiative to rush his men—including the 83rd Pennsylvania—onto Little Round Top, holding the Union army's exposed left flank at a decisive moment. Mortally wounded rallying his troops, he was promoted to brigadier general days before he died.

Dauphin, PA · est. 1948

Timothy Green's life traced the whole arc of Pennsylvania's revolutionary generation. He first bore arms as an officer in the French and Indian War, then in June 1774 joined his neighbors in signing the Hanover Resolves, a bold early declaration of readiness to resist British authority. Through the Revolution that followed he stood out as a leader of this Susquehanna-region community, and he rests today in the graveyard just south of the marker.

Connellsville, PA · est. 1966

William Crawford was a frontier soldier and surveyor who settled near the Youghiogheny River after 1766, serving as George Washington's western land agent at a time when Virginia and Pennsylvania families were pushing across the Appalachians. During the Revolution he took up arms on the frontier, leading a 1782 expedition against Native villages along the Sandusky River in Ohio. The campaign ended in disaster: Crawford was captured and put to death, a killing that became notorious in the bitter borderland warfare of the era.

Colebrookdale Township, PA · est. 1967

Founded around 1720 on Iron Stone Creek by a partnership including Thomas Rutter and Thomas Potts, this ironworks is regarded as the first blast furnace erected in Pennsylvania. Named for a furnace in England, it drew on the region's rich ore and abundant timber for charcoal, casting the iron that a growing colony needed. It launched a Pennsylvania iron industry that would one day help make the state the forge of the nation.

Rostraver Township, PA · est. 1994

Edward Cook came to this corner of western Pennsylvania in the 1770s and rose to become one of its leading citizens — a large landholder, judge, and politician who sat in the Provincial Congress at Philadelphia in 1776 and helped shape the state's constitution. Though a moderate by temperament, when the Whiskey Rebellion swept the frontier in 1792–94 he cast his lot with the tax protesters and was chosen to chair several key rebel meetings.

Stroudsburg, PA · est. 1931

This graveyard began as the cemetery of the Mission of Dansbury, a Moravian outpost started in 1743 near where Daniel Brodhead had settled in 1736. The mission chapel was destroyed during the Indian uprising of 1755 amid the French and Indian War, then rebuilt. Colonel Jacob Stroud — the frontier officer and founder of Stroudsburg — lies buried here.

Athens Township, PA · est. 1946

John Franklin was a leading figure in the Connecticut settlers' claim to lands in the Wyoming Valley, a bitter dispute with Pennsylvania over overlapping colonial grants. He served in the Sullivan Campaign of 1779, was imprisoned from 1787 to 1789 for backing a movement to carve a new state out of the contested territory, and later sat in the Pennsylvania legislature. He settled here in 1789 and died in 1831, with his homesite and grave just east of the road.

Connellsville, PA · est. 1918

Born in Virginia in 1732, William Crawford was a pioneer surveyor and friend of George Washington who built his cabin at Stewart's Crossing on the Youghiogheny in 1765. He first came west with Forbes's 1758 campaign, crossed the Delaware with Washington in 1777, and shared the victory at Trenton. Leading the Sandusky Expedition against Native towns in 1782, he was captured and burned at the stake in Ohio — one of the frontier war's most infamous deaths.

Chester, PA · est. 1954

Raised in 1724 in a restrained Georgian Colonial style and restored in 1920, this Chester landmark served as a courthouse for Chester County until 1786 and then for Delaware County from 1789 to 1851, later doing duty as City Hall. It is celebrated as the oldest public building in continuous use in the United States.

Concord Township, PA · est. 1959

In the early 1700s, water-powered gristmills were the beating heart of rural Pennsylvania, grinding a settlement's grain into flour and giving neighbors a reason to gather. This stone mill was raised in 1704 by Nathaniel Newlin, a Quaker who had crossed from Ireland two decades earlier into William Penn's tolerant colony. Restored to working order, it survives as a rare, tangible piece of the machinery that kept a colonial community fed.

Lancaster, PA · est. 1950

This Lancaster house, built in the true Georgian style before 1760, stands on ground merchant Thomas Poultney purchased in 1749. Georgian architecture — with its balanced proportions and formal symmetry — was the fashionable choice of prosperous colonial townsmen. John Passmore, Lancaster's first mayor, lived here at one time, tying the house to the early civic life of what was then one of the largest inland towns in the American colonies.

Greenfield Township, PA · est. 1951

In 1797, as agent for the Pennsylvania Population Company, Judah Colt planted the first organized settlement in Erie County at the head of navigable water on French Creek. The location was chosen with commerce in mind: flatboats could carry goods and settlers downstream from this frontier launching point. Colt's Station became an early anchor for American expansion into the northwestern corner of the state.

Columbia, PA · est. 1947

Founded as Wright's Ferry in 1726 at a strategic crossing of the broad Susquehanna, the town later renamed Columbia became a hinge of early American movement inland. Turnpikes, canals, and railroads converged here, and the first bridge across the river was raised in 1812 — an era when this river town was even briefly considered as a site for the national capital.

Bloomsburg, PA · est. 1983

Columbia County was carved from Northumberland County in 1813 during the early republic's rapid subdivision of Pennsylvania's frontier interior, its name a patriotic nod to the young United States. Its seat, Bloomsburg, holds the distinction of being Pennsylvania's only incorporated town, and the county's Quaker roots reach back to a Friends meetinghouse raised at Catawissa around 1789. The famous twin covered bridges at Forks remain a beloved local landmark.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2006

At 3747 Ridge Avenue in Philadelphia, the computer age turned commercial. Here BINAC passed its verification tests in 1949 as the world's first commercial, electronic, stored-program digital computer, followed in 1951 by the customer acceptance of UNIVAC I. Both machines were led by J. Presper Eckert and John W. Mauchly, the same duo who had built the pioneering ENIAC.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2014

John Barry went to sea as a boy from Ireland and rose to command his own merchant ship in Philadelphia by his early twenties. During the Revolution he won a string of daring engagements, many along the Delaware River, and after independence President Washington named him the first commissioned officer of the new United States Navy, where he oversaw the building of its first frigates. Often called the 'Father of the American Navy,' he served until his death in 1803.

Kennedy Township, PA

This community monument in Kennedy Township honors the ordinary residents who gave their time and labor to keep local life running — the volunteer firefighters, first responders, civic clubs, and neighbors whose unpaid service built and sustained the small industrial towns of Allegheny County along the Ohio River. Such tributes reflect a deep American tradition of civic voluntarism, where the strength of a community rested not on paid officials but on the willingness of its people to pitch in. In the mill towns west of Pittsburgh, that spirit of mutual aid shaped everything from fire brigades to fraternal lodges to relief in hard times.

Nanticoke, PA · est. 1998

In 1913, the coal division of the D L & W Railroad built an unusual experiment in worker housing north of Nanticoke. Twenty-two identical poured-concrete double houses, arranged around a central park, drew on emerging modern design ideas to shelter miners of the Truesdale Colliery. The community was short-lived, abandoned by 1924, its bare concrete shells left standing.

Manor Township, PA · est. 1924

The people remembered here were survivors of the once-powerful Susquehannock (Minquas) nation, an Iroquoian people whose towns had commanded the lower Susquehanna before war and disease shattered them. Regrouped as the Conestoga, they lived on land within William Penn's proprietary manor and treated with Penn himself in 1701 under his policy of peaceful dealing. That fragile peace ended in 1763, when a vigilante mob from Paxton murdered the last of them.

Lancaster Township, PA · est. 2001

In the canal-building fever of the 1820s, the Conestoga Navigation Company set out to tame Lancaster County's Conestoga Creek with a slackwater system of locks and dams, connecting the rich farm country around Lancaster to the great port markets of Philadelphia and Baltimore. Chartered in 1825, its eighteen-mile course climbed through nine sets of locks, with Lock No. 1 standing here at the head of the line. Like many early canals it struggled financially against the coming railroads, collecting its last lock tolls in 1872. In a fitting second life, several of its abandoned dams were later harnessed to generate electricity from 1913 into the 1940s.

Oxford Township, PA · est. 1947

Founded as a mission in 1730 and crowned with a chapel in 1787, Conewago stands among the oldest Catholic congregations in the United States and the first dedicated to the Sacred Heart in Pennsylvania. Jesuit priests ministered here to a community of German and Irish Catholic settlers at a time when their faith was barely tolerated in the British colonies. The enduring chapel is a rare survival of colonial-era Catholic worship on the American frontier.

Warren, PA · est. 1947

On the ground where Warren now stands sat Conewango, a Seneca village of the mid-18th century. The French chronicler Father Bonnecamps first recorded it in 1749 as a cluster of twelve or thirteen cabins during Céloron's passage through the valley. Its name, drawn from the Iroquois tongue, means "below the riffles," a reminder of how thoroughly Native peoples read and named this river country.

Chambersburg, PA · est. 1953

In the tense days before Gettysburg, the Confederate army swept north into Pennsylvania, and Chambersburg found itself briefly in the path of the invasion. On June 26, 1863, Robert E. Lee rode into the town square—the old "Diamond"—and conferred with corps commander A.P. Hill before setting up headquarters on the edge of town. Within days those same roads would carry his troops east toward the war's decisive battle.

Wilkes-Barre, PA · est. 1947

In 1762 settlers from Connecticut planted their first community here on the Susquehanna Purchase, a tract the colony claimed under its sea-to-sea charter deep in what Pennsylvania considered its own territory. The fragile settlement was destroyed in an Indian attack on October 15, 1763, and the valley lay unsettled by the newcomers until they returned in 1769. The episode opened one of colonial America's most contested land struggles in the Wyoming Valley.

North Union Township, PA · est. 2007

Spanning Fayette and Westmoreland Counties, the Connellsville Coke Region sat atop the rich Pittsburgh coal vein, whose coal baked into an exceptionally pure coke prized for smelting iron. From the mid-19th century into the 1970s, thousands of beehive ovens glowed across the hills, fed by immigrant and migrant laborers who streamed in after the Civil War to work the booming trade. Byproduct ovens built beside the steel mills eventually made the old beehives obsolete.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1998

Cornelius McGillicuddy — known to the baseball world as Connie Mack — managed the Philadelphia Athletics for an unmatched fifty seasons. From 1901 to 1950 the tall, dignified skipper in his street clothes and scorecard led the club to nine pennants and five World Series titles, and managed the American League in the first All-Star Game. He made his home here on Cliveden Street and entered the Hall of Fame in 1937.

Conoy Township, PA · est. 1967

For roughly a generation in the early 1700s, the Conoy people maintained a settlement just west of this spot in the lower Susquehanna Valley. Closely tied to the Nanticoke, with whom they would eventually merge, the Conoy had drifted north into Pennsylvania from the Chesapeake Bay country under mounting colonial pressure. Their town here marks one waypoint in a long, forced migration.

Pine Grove, PA · est. 1994

Born in Pine Grove, novelist Conrad Richter spent his career giving voice to the American frontier and the sweep of the country's settlement, in works such as "The Town" and "The Waters of Kronos." A winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, he returned to his native region and lived and worked in this house from 1950 to 1968. His fiction turned ordinary pioneers into enduring American characters.

Heidelberg Township, PA · est. 1947

Conrad Weiser was colonial Pennsylvania's indispensable go-between, a German immigrant who lived among the Mohawk as a youth and grew into the province's chief interpreter and negotiator with the Iroquois. From the 1730s to the 1750s he brokered the treaties that kept fragile peace on the frontier, earning from Native leaders the title "Holder of the Heavens." He lived and was buried here on land now preserved as a state park in his memory.

Reading, PA · est. 1951

Around 1750 a hewn-log trading post rose on this Berks County site, run until 1760 by Conrad Weiser — pioneer settler, judge, and above all the colony's indispensable go-between with Native nations. Fluent in the Iroquois tongue, Weiser negotiated treaties and interpreted at councils during the tense decades when Pennsylvania's fate hinged on its relations with the Six Nations and the Delaware.

Mansfield, PA · est. 1983

Completed in 1840, the Corning & Blossburg Railroad was one of the earliest railroads in the Northeast, running from Corning, New York, down to the coal fields around Blossburg, Pennsylvania. Built by the Tioga Navigation Company, it stitched together the Chemung Canal and the Erie Railroad with the region's mines, moving coal to distant markets. It marked the moment when rails began to supplement and surpass the canals of the young industrial age.

Oil City, PA · est. 2017

Cornplanter (1738–1836) was a Seneca war leader turned diplomat who fought for the British during the Revolution, then chose to bind the Iroquois Confederacy to the fragile new United States. In the tense years that followed, he mediated between Native nations and encroaching settlers, seeking peace even as he grew disillusioned when treaties failed to treat his people fairly. In 1796 Pennsylvania granted him and his heirs three tracts of land, including one near present-day Oil City.

Cornwall, PA · est. 1947

The Cornwall Banks were among the richest iron deposits in the world and the oldest continuously worked mine in the New World, yielding ore for more than two centuries. From colonial furnaces that helped arm the Revolution to the industrial age, this Lebanon County hillside fed a steady stream of Pennsylvania iron — long described as the greatest such ore body east of Lake Superior.