Centre County Government

1. Agricultural Heritage

The first to dream about Centre County dreamed of an agricultural empire.

The valley James Potter saw from Centre Hall Mountain in 1764. "Plains" at the foot of Egg Hill may have been as free of forest then as now.

Plantation sprang to James Potter's mind when he first saw a great valley in August 1764, as he reached the top of Centre Hall Mountain. The valley kept opening more and more before his eyes. He even saw natural clearings of grassland among the trees—"Plains," he called them—and exclaimed: "By God Thompson, I've discovered an empire!"

Plantation dreams made him see the land in terms of headwaters, controlling water transport to market, and keep his eye open for the shortest paths to navigation. The first description of the county is Potter's, in a 1773 legal document:

The Valley at the heads of Penns and Bald Eagle Creeks on the South side of the Nittany Mountain, commonly known by the name of Penns Valley, Situated as the Roads now goe about 18 or 19 Miles distant from Juniata at the mouth of Kishicoquillas ... By the Valley I mean the Center of the Valley or near the Center of it, and that the same Valley or about the Center of it lies about 12 or 13 Miles Southwards from the Bald Eagles Nest... And I have been in a part of the Brushey Valley, which has been mostly (as I am informed) surveyed for Samuel Miles, and which cannot strictly speaking be considered as a Distinct Valley from Penns Valley, part of it communicating with Penns Valley and part separated by a Ridge, which might be said without any Impropriety to rest in the middle of the great or Penns Valley.

Col. Potter led a band of Scots-Irish settlers and planters into the headwaters country just before the Revolution. Some brought slaves. The frontier stalled right across the future Centre County for two decades of bad times while settlers and Indians emptied each other's farms. Potter, now a General, returned with his family and friends to find farmers surging in from the Susquehanna Valley. Samuel Miles was selling his 9,000 acres in Brush Valley—the Elk Creek watershed—to hard-working Pennsylvania Germans.

Aaron Levy inscribed the sacramental vessels he gave the Christian settlers of his inland town in Penns Valley in German because that was what they spoke.

When Centre County was erected in 1800, Aaronsburg did not make it as the county seat, but the great preponderance of the new countians were farmers, and 5 out of 8 lived in "greater Penns Valley" (Haines, Miles, Potter, Ferguson townships).

Stone house built in 1801 as the seat of Senator Andrew Gregg's plantation in Penns Valley. CCHS collections

This agricultural heritage is still visible everywhere in the county. Great stone houses joined to mills or barns, and fencerow boundaries and lanes keep to this day the lines of original warrant surveys, preserving the past on living farms.