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 […]
Eagle Ironworks was one of Centre County’s major family enterprises for a century and the last cold-blast charcoal iron establishment to close in Pennsylvania. Roland Curtin and Moses Boggs built Eagle Forge along the Bald Eagle Creek downstream from Milesburg in 1810. Though the men had no experience in iron making, all the essential raw […]
Class gifts are philanthropic donations given by graduating Penn State classes that have made a significant impact on the university, including some of the most beloved and recognize landmarks. The mission of the annual Class Gift Campaign is to promote a philanthropic spirit among graduating students.
The Centre Furnace Mansion, originally the home of the furnace’s ironmaster, was the meeting place for the founding of the institution that became Penn State. The mansion on East College Avenue is now a historic house museum and the headquarters of the Centre County Historical Society.
During its ninety-year lifespan, the Bellefonte Central Railroad hauled nearly 16 million tons of Centre County limestone and lime to connecting railroads for distribution to industrial customers in a dozen states. For more than five decades, the railroad also made daily passenger round trips to State College.
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 […]
The Armory, built in 1892 to provide military training for Penn State students, was a landmark campus building until it was demolished in 1964 to provide space for a new wing for undergraduate classrooms in Willard Building.
The county’s agricultural history is geographically bifurcated. The Allegheny Front divides the fertile Ridge and Valley region from the agriculturally less well-endowed Allegheny Plateau. On the plateau, diversified small-scale farming and industrial work intermingled, while in the valleys, there was a more agricultural economy.
Chartered by the Commonwealth in 1855, the Farmers’ High School of Pennsylvania by the early 1860s had become the first successful agricultural college in America. The impetus for the school that became Penn State came from the Pennsylvania State Agricultural Society founded to promote the state’s vast farming community.
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 […]