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Pennsylvania Counties

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Pennsylvania Counties

There are sixty-seven counties of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in the United States of America. The city of Philadelphia is coterminous with Philadelphia County, and governmental functions have been consolidated since 1854.

Clarion County, Pennsylvania

Clarion County History, Geography, Demographics, Cities and Towns, and Education

County Seat: Clarion
Year Organized: 1839
Square Miles: 602

Court House:

401 Main Street
County Courthouse
Clarion, PA 16214-1020

Etymology - Origin of County Name

Named for the Clarion River, a tributary of the Allegheny River, approximately 110 mi (177 km) long, in west central Pennsylvania in the United States. It drains a mountainous area of the Allegheny Plateau in the Ohio River watershed, flowing through narrow serpentine valleys and hardwood forests.

Demographics:

County QuickFacts: Census Bureau Quick Facts

County History

Created on March 11, 1839 from parts of Venango and Armstrong Counties and named for the Clarion River. Clarion, the county seat, was incorporated as a borough on April 6, 1841.

Formed on land acquired from Indians by the Treaty of Fort Stanwix in 1784, it was first owned by the Holland, Pickering, and Bingham land development companies. Settlement began in 1797, and a lumber industry sprang up which relied on floating logs down the Clarion River to the Allegheny. Boat building developed and lumber was also used for making charcoal—needed for a local iron industry—but the lumber based economy played out by 1900 because the trees were not replaced. Cook Forest State Park is the home of the only significant stand of primeval trees in the state. An oil boom lasted from 1869 to 1879; bituminous coal mining began in 1877. Surface strip bituminous coal mining has been in operation since 1920. Having both fire clay and natural gas, a pottery industry flourished in the nineteenth century. The Philadelphia and Erie Railroad was built through the county in the 1870s. The 40,000 population of 1880 was not equaled again until the 1980 census. There is a farming tradition; in total receipts from farm products Clarion ranks about 44th among the 67 counties. Farms occupy 31 percent of the land. There were Underground Railroad stations at Clarion, Rimersburg, and Shippensville.

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 609 square miles (1,577 km²), of which, 602 square miles (1,560 km²) of it is land and 7 square miles (17 km²) of it (1.07%) is water.

Neighboring Counties:

Forest County (north)
Jefferson County (east)
Armstrong County (south)
Butler County (southwest)
Venango County (west)

Cities and Towns:

Callensburg	borough	Incorporated Area
- Clarion (County Seat)	borough	Incorporated Area
- East Brady	borough	Incorporated Area
- Foxburg	borough	Incorporated Area
- Hawthorn	borough	Incorporated Area
- Highland	township
- Knox	borough	Incorporated Area
- Licking	township
- Limestone	township
- New Bethlehem	borough	Incorporated Area
- Piney	township
- Redbank	township
- Rimersburg	borough	Incorporated Area
- Salem	township
- Shippenville	borough	Incorporated Area
- Sligo	borough	Incorporated Area
- St. Petersburg	borough	Incorporated Area
- Strattanville	borough	Incorporated Area
- Toby	township

County Resources:

Enter County Resources and Information Here

County Resources

The history of our nation was a prolonged struggle to define the relative roles and powers of our governments: federal, state, and local. And the names given the counties, our most locally based jurisdictions, reflects the "characteristic features of this country!"

But age, size and colorful names of our counties isn't the only reason to explore counties' role in American history, or the history of county government itself. In fact, the story of county government reflects the larger meanings of American history.

Today's counties are the most flexible, locally responsive and creative governments in the US. They are the most diverse, varying in size, population, geography, and governmental structure. In their politics and policies, they express a 1990's political slogan "Think globally, act locally."