The Centre County Courthouse in Bellefonte, built in 1805, is one of the county’s most historic landmarks. The courthouse has been transformed over the years with additions and renovations. The Soldiers and Sailors Memorial and Andrew G. Curtin statue stand in front of the building framing it from High Street.
A quest for natural resources shaped the development of Centre County’s rail network, beginning in 1859 when the Bellefonte and Snow Shoe Railroad began hauling coal and timber from the Mountaintop area to the Bald Eagle Valley.
Spring Creek Canyon is an 1,800-acre recreation area in Benner Township popular for fly-fishing, hiking, bicycling, and hunting. The six miles of trout stream within its boundaries are a destination for fishermen from around the world.
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 […]
“Such times and scenes were witnessed in this beautiful valley during these last two weeks were never before dreamt of much less imagined,” Samuel Gramly of Rebersburg wrote in a journal on August 31, 1862. A school teacher in Brush Valley, Gramly had marveled at the recruitment and enlistment of dozens of local men into […]
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 […]
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.
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 […]