There is some mystery as to who were the original inhabitants of Butler County in precolonial times. Although many Native American tribes had visited and lived in the are...
By 1763, the British settlements and forts along what was then the Western frontier in Western Pennsylvania and Ohio were either captured, destroyed or besieged by an unp...
After the end of the Revolutionary War, Pennsylvania lawmakers found themselves in a bind: no money to pay the veterans of the conflict and vast tracts of land it had acq...
The end of the Revolutionary War left American soldiers stuck with worthless money and the fledgling American government stuck with no treaty with the Native American tri...
The first newspapers of Butler County were very different from what people today would think of as a newspaper.
According to “The Press and America” by Edwin Emery, early...
It’s not so much the weight of history that Butler County archivists have to deal with but rather the sheer volume of history.
The Butler County Historical Society, the S...
Today, if it’s remembered at all, the Erie Canal is best known as the subject of a folk song, “Low Bridge Everybody Down” or “Fifteen Miles on the Erie Canal.”
But, accor...
The first farmers had to wrest cropland from the forests that covered Butler County using little more than primitive implements and their own strength.
It was called a “H...
Frontier medicine in the early settlement of Butler County was as rough-hewn as the log cabins of the early pioneers.
The first settlers of the county spent hard, laborio...
