Hi Everybody: I found this Chapter from "The First 100 Years" Settlement and Growth in Crawford Co, Pa. by Jonathan E. Helmreich very informative and thought I would pass it along. COUNTY COMMUNITIES Pg. 14-17 In planning his mills while working for the land company, Alden decided the best site for a dam on French Creek was north of Meadville. He was in part attracted to this site by the amount of produce coming from the farms of two Scotch-Irish families named McGill who in 1792 were the first settlers in that locale; nearby farms were also doing well. Aden bought two hundred acres in 1802, and soon the community was known as Alden Mills --- now Saegertown. There was great competition between this community and Meadville for designation as the county seat when the Pa. legislature created several new counties in Western Pa. on March 12, 1800. These included the present Crawford Co., land for which was taken from Allegheny Co. which previously had embraced all of Northwestern Pa. Before the partition of Allegheny County (itself formed in 1788), Mead Twp. at first contained all of what was to become Crawford and Erie Counties. Then Erie Township was created in 1788. Though Crawford and Erie Counties were formed at the same time, the border between them was disputed until a new survey was made in 1850. Crawford County itself was divided into nine (9) townships by the first session of court held in July 1800 at the home of Wm Dick in Meadville. Mead twp. of course became much smaller, although it was still larger than it would be in the 1980's. The first new townships were BEAVER, CONNEAUT, CUSSEWAGO, FAIRFIELD, FALLOWFIELD, SADSBURY, SHENANGO, and VENANGO. Rockdale and Oil Creek townships were formed later that year, and others followed. In 1829 a general reorganization of boundaries took place and several new townships appeared, including GREENWOOD, HAYFIELD, SPRING, SUMMERHILL, and WOODCOCK. Borders were redrawn and more townships established in later years as new centers of population asked for independent status. The changes did not always occur without argument. Upon it creation in 1800, the new county was named for Col. Wm Crawford, a frontiersman and friend of George Washington. He lived along the Younghiogheny River and participated in the Rev. War, first in the East and then in the region of Fort Pitt, where he led small raids against hostile Indians. In 1782 the fifty year old Crawford led an expedition against the western Indians near Sandusky. His troops first fell upon and massacred a group of pacifist Moravian Christian Indians before encountering more fierce combatants. Crawford's men were intially successful in heavy fighting. But the Revolutionary War was not yet at an end, and the tide of battle turned with the arrival of additional bands of Indians and of the mounted British Butler's Rangers, a mixture of tories, Indians, and British regular troops. In a scattered night retreat to the Ohio River, Crawford was captured by Delawares. He was marched to a distant campsite where he was tethered to a pole by a long leash. Fires were lit about the pole, and Crawford was forced to dance through them as he was chased by Indians with glowing firesticks and firearms used to give him powder burns. He died at the stake on June 11, 1782. Though Crawford was never a resident of the county named for him, the Pa. legislature deemed his service worthy of this memorial. Because population in the new counteis was sparse, the courts for several of them were to be located at the Crawford Co. seat which, the legislature said, would be Meadville if the community could within four months raise $4000 for the creation of a "seminary of learning." Spurred by thought of the prestige and business connected with the title of county seat, the approx. 200 male white citizens (some accounts say 125) of Meadville raised the funds in two days. Roger Alden, not yet an investor in the upstream community (later Alden's Mills) rivalling Meadville for the designation, was the largest subscriber. David Mead's name headed the list of all those supporting the creation of the academy or high school. There were other communities which briefly dreamed of being the county seat. Jabez Colt, one of the agents for the Pa. Population Co. which held lands widely surrounding Meadville, founded two villages; Colt's Station and New Colt's Station (near Linesville). Neither survived, though the second made a weak bid to become the county seat. The names of the townships and the settlements within them are a guide to the early history of the county. Some names descend from Indian tongues; Cussewago (either "bigsnake or "big belly," perhaps named for the stream's sinuous course, or perhaps because Indians once saw a large snake in a tree along the creek which had a swelling in its length from recently eating a rabbit or some other creature); Conneaut ("snowy place" because snow stayed on the surface of the lake after snow on the land had melted); Venango (from a Seneca word for a obscene drawing found on a tree at the mouth of French Creek). Other township names reflected the characteristics of the area: Beaver (where the animals were thick until completely trapped out by 1835; the species would make a ruturn many decades later); Pine (where much timber has been logged off), Greenwood, Hayfield; Fountain House Corners (where an artesian well constantly flowed in the back yard of a tavern). Some names give witness either to the native homes of the first settlers or to classical inspiration: Cambridge, Athens, Rome, Sparta, Troy. Spring Township was first called Snowhill. Its citizens believed such a name depressing, especially when compared with that of nearby Summerhill, and at their request the court provided a new name. The settlers of the region were religious, as judged from the founding of many churches and of a Bible Society as early as 1815 and by the some forty Sabbath Schools present in the county in 1825. Nevertheless Crawford Co. settlers did not choose to name a single location in the county after a Biblical site. To Be Continued. Bev