One generation after the Declaration of Independence launched the democratic American experiment, the young nation appeared to be thriving in 1840. The United States popu...
One doesn’t think of Edgar Allan Poe as a Pennsylvanian, but the Boston, Massachusetts native did live in Philadelphia from 1838-1844.
It was a time in which some observ...
Frontier medicine in the early settlement of Butler County was as rough-hewn as the log cabins of the early pioneers.
The first settlers of the county spent hard, laborio...
Clearfield Township’s name is a reminder that the first European colonists in the area were far from the first people to live here.
In 1798, when the area that would even...
As America pushed westward, old divisions over slavery deepened — setting the stage for Civil War.
America was halfway through its first full century as a free nation in ...
Butler County’s past lives on in more than historical markers and names on tombstones. Many institutions created over a century ago still exist in the county, if in alter...
It’s impossible to know who the first person to discover oil on the banks of Oil Creek in Venango County was, because by the time settlers arrived, Native Americans had b...
Betsey Stivert Grossman must have been nervous when she agreed to accompany her husband, Benedict, upon his decision in 1797 to move their family from York County to the ...
Stephen Collins Foster was born on the Fourth of July 1826 — the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — in what’s now the Lawrenceville neighborhood of Pit...
Worth Township was a relatively recent addition to the map of Butler County. It was created in 1855 and formed mostly from land taken from Muddy Creek Township and a smal...