Leonard Rhone was a farmer, Pennsylvania state legislator, and founder of the Centre County Grange Encampment and Fair. Rhone was born in 1838 in a log cabin built near Centre Hall by his grandfather. Rhone and his father Jacob rebuilt the family homestead into the Georgian-style estate they called Rhoneymede, a German-derived name meaning “Rhone’s […]
Mildred Settle Bunton was the first female student of color admitted to Penn State and the first to graduate from the university. She enrolled in 1929 as a transfer from the University of New Orleans and graduated in 1932 with a degree in home economics.
William G. Waring was Principal of the Faculty and Professor of Horticulture at the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania. William Griffith Waring was born in Herefordshire, England, in 1816 and emigrated to Centre County where he became a teacher and a nurseryman, owning a farm in Oak Hall. Waring organized the first teachers institute in […]
Roland Curtin was founder of the Eagle Ironworks and patriarch of the Curtin family that included a son who was Pennsylvania’s governor during the Civil War. Curtin, a native of Ireland, moved to the Bald Eagle valley in 1797. He lived in Milesburg initially but later moved to Bellefonte, Centre County’s new seat of government, […]
George Washington Atherton — Penn State’s “second founder” — was the longest-serving president in the institution’s history. During nearly a quarter-century, from 1882 to 1906, Atherton took a failing college and transformed it into a stable institution poised for growth in the twentieth century. For all his work in building Penn State, however, perhaps his […]
Evan Pugh was the first president of the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania, the fledgling institution that, under his leadership, would become Penn State. Pugh’s great accomplishment did not come easily. Beginning in the early 1850s, state agricultural societies fueled a movement to establish agricultural colleges. These new institutions seemed oxymoronic to some — college […]
Andrew Gregg Curtin was the governor of Pennsylvania during the Civil War and one of President Abraham Lincoln’s staunchest supporters. Curtin was born in Bellefonte on April 22, 1815. His father, Roland Curtin, owned the Eagle Ironworks, and his mother, Jane Gregg, was the daughter of U.S. Senator Andrew Gregg, Curtin’s namesake. Curtin attended Bellefonte […]