Centre County Overview

Centre County, the state's fifth largest county in land area (1115 square miles), has thirty-six governmental municipalities – twenty-five townships and eleven boroughs, and nearly 100 towns and villages extending geographically from Philipsburg to Rebersburg, and alphabetically from Aaronsburg to Zion. The oldest, Aaronsburg, was laid out in 1786; State College, one of the newest, celebrated its centennial in 1996.

With the turn of the 20th century, the days of iron smelting and canal transport were memories, and the era of lumbering and of turnpikes was at its end. The great county network of railways soon disintegrated as ore mining came to a halt and the "horseless carriage" absorbed local passenger traffic. Education became the county's major emphasis in the 20th century as The Pennsylvania State University grew to become Centre County's most well-known attraction.

Several of the extractive industries continued to thrive. Bituminous coal mining remained important and experienced an expansion when strip-mining was introduced. The terra cotta and fire clay industries, finding ready markets for their products, dug ever deepening gashes into the mountain ridges. Limestone quarries all over the county responded to new demands of the builders of hard-surfaced roads and fabricators in concrete. Brass and bronze products were added to the county's output of manufactured goods, as were a variety of textile materials, bakery products, and canned foods. Electrical power production became a new phase of local enterprise. By mid-century, manufactured goods constituted two-thirds of the total value of all products in the county.

Great changes in transportation, marked by the road-paving program of the 1920s and 1930s, more than compensated for the rapid curtailment of local railroad facilities, and motor-bus service became the main means of public transport.

But at the same time air transport was slowly developing and gave evidence of becoming one of the major turning points in the history of the region. Air service came to the county in 1918 with the first flight of air mail in U.S. history. Bellefonte was a stopping point on the original route. About a decade later the State College Air Depot began operations at the Boalsburg Field. During WWII a large airstrip was built on the mountain top at Black Moshannon. And in 1949, at the new State College Air Depot, commercial air transport in and out of Centre County was formally inaugurated. This service ushered in a new era of transportation, overcoming for the first time the mountain barriers which had formerly rendered the region difficult to access, whether by Indian trail in 1740 or by concrete road in 1940.

Centre County's population rose from 4,000 in 1800 to nearly 42,894 by 1900. Between 1900 and 1950 it grew again, to 65,000. Many of the newcomers who joined the Scotch-Irish and Germans already here, came from the southern and central parts of Europe. Two hundred years later, Centre County's population is approximately135,000, with the largest concentration centered primarily in the Centre Region.

One of Centre County's greatest assets is its abundant wildlife in a setting of great natural beauty. Fishermen's Paradise, the Scotia Game Lands, and Black Moshannon, Bald Eagle, and Poe Valley State Parks are just a few of these public parks and facilities available to Centre Countians.