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Washington County, PA
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Created on March 28, 1781 from part of Westmoreland
County and named in honor of George Washington.
Washington, the county seat, was laid out in 1781,
incorporated as a borough on February 12, 1810, and
chartered as a city in 1924.
 Indian
ownership was yielded to Pennsylvania by the “New
Purchase” deed at Ft. Stanwix in 1768, but Virginia
claimed southwestern Pennsylvania (all the way to
Pittsburgh) until she yielded the argument in 1780.
Scots-Irish led by three Presbyterian clergy, founded
Buffalo, Amity, and Canonsburg, about 1775. One, the
Rev. John McMillan, became a strong political leader.
Indian raids lasted until the 1790s. This was a center
of the Whiskey Rebellion (1794), of which David Bradford
was the leader, but after that distilling declined. In
time, sheep created prosperity, increasingly so with the
spread of the efficient Merino breed between 1820 and
1840. The National Road led to the founding of
Centerville, Claysville, and Beallsville, but the
arrival of the Pennsylvania Railroad in Pittsburgh, in
1852, eclipsed the prosperity that the National Road’s
wagon route had stimulated. The opening of U.S. Route 40
early in the twentieth century benefited Washington.
Small railroads entered the county in the 1850s; coal
mining grew after 1865 and the county is still one of
the major coal producers. Natural gas was harnessed for
sale in 1884, the same year oil was struck. Small steel
mills began around 1900, and a glass industry flourished
from the 1880s to the 1950s. Steel processing, steel
products, and other metal products are strong businesses
in the county. Today, Washington rivals Greene as top
producing county for sheep and wool. Forty percent of
the land is farmed, and the county is a significant
producer of apples, cattle, and alfalfa and forage
crops.
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