McKean County: Where the Gold is Green

The great gold and silver rushes of the late nineteenth century to places such as the Black Hills, Colorado, Arizona, California and Alaska have long been hailed in story and song for their excite­ment, riches and heartbreak. But, the rush for “green gold” to McKean County during the same century was equally or more exciting. First, there were the forests – immense forests of...
read more

Lost and Found

Lost Solomon R. Dresser (1842-1911), who amassed a for­tune in the oil industry, built his palatial residence, Belleview Terrace, in Bradford, McKean County, in 1903 after being entranced by the Michigan Building at the 1901 Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Many Bradford residents who grew wealthy during the oil boom years erected huge houses (see “Survival of An American Boom...
read more

Survival of an American Boom Town

No stirring debates reverberate through the chambers of Philadelphia’s Independence Hall; white-hot molten steel no longer pours out of the fiery cauldrons in the sprawling mills of Pittsburgh and Bethlehem; and little coal ripped from the earth by giant steam shovels in Carbon, Schuylkill, Luzerne, and Lackawanna Counties in the Keystone State’s anthracite region. As surprising as...
read more