e-ReferenceDesk's College and 50 State Learning Resource Guide

Find Online Colleges

Find Campus Colleges

Pennsylvania State...

Pennsylvania

Choose a County

Adams, Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Bedford, Berks, Blair, Bradford, Bucks, Butler, Cambria, Cameron, Carbon, Centre, Chester, Clarion, Clearfield, Clinton, Columbia, Crawford, Cumberland, Dauphin, Delaware, Elk, Erie, Fayette, Forest, Franklin, Fulton, Greene, Huntingdon, Indiana, Jefferson, Juniata, Lackawanna, Lancaster, Lawrence, Lebanon, Lehigh, Luzerne, Lycoming, McKean, Mercer, Mifflin, Monroe, Montgomery, Montour, Northampton, Northumberland, Perry, Philadelphia, Pike, Potter, Schuylkill, Snyder, Somerset, Sullivan, Susquehanna, Tioga, Union, Venango, Warren, Washington, Wayne, Westmoreland, Wyoming, York

Pennsylvania Counties

Click Image to Enlarge

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.

Forest County, Pennsylvania

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

County Seat: Tionesta
Year Organized: 1848
Square Miles: 428

Court House:

526 Elm Street
County Courthouse
Tionesta, PA 16353-0000

Etymology - Origin of County Name

Named for its extensive forests.

Demographics:

County QuickFacts: Census Bureau Quick Facts

County History

Created on April 1, 1848, from part of Jefferson County. Part of Venango County was added on October 31, 1866. It was named for its extensive forests. It was attached to Jefferson County until 1857 when Marienville became the county seat. Tionesta, the county seat after 1866, was incorporated as a borough on February 28, 1856, and was named for the Tionesta Creek.

Tom Cook acquired the first timber lands near Cooksburg. Cyrus Blood founded Marienville as a center for the lumber industry and succeeded in having the county formed by the legislature. Leather tanning was an important enterprise. Until about 1900 timber barons shaped events, but by then the original timber was largely gone. The state purchased the Cook family lands and preserves them for recreation. Today, the Allegheny National First covers over 40 percent of the area, and additional lands are owned for commercial lumber production. There was a brief oil boom, and glass was manufactured at Marienville from 1914 to 1982 relying on the abundance of natural gas, which produces intense heat quickly. The population peak of 11,000 occurred in 1900. Farming has never been very successful and is confined to only two percent of the countryside. The construction of the Tionesta Creek Dam considerably altered the topography. Forest County's border lines were not clearly defined until 1867.

Geography

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the county has a total area of 431 square miles (1,117 km²), of which, 428 square miles (1,109 km²) of it is land and 3 square miles (8 km²) of it (0.76%) is water.

Neighboring Counties:

Warren County (north)
McKean County (northeast)
Elk County (east)
Jefferson County (south)
Clarion County (south)
Venango County (west)

Cities and Towns:

- Barnett	township
- Green	township
- Jenks	township
- Tionesta (County Seat)	borough	Incorporated Area

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."