Peter Brenton's Cabin

This cabin marks the man whose name the town carries. Petersburg, the seat of Pike County, took its name from Peter Brenton, an original owner of the town site.

Pike County itself was the first county organized after Indiana became a state, set off in December of eighteen sixteen and named for the explorer Zebulon Pike. The commissioners chose Petersburg as the county seat early in eighteen seventeen, and the town grew up around the courthouse on the bluffs above the White River. A post office opened here in eighteen twenty-three.

The rest of Petersburg's story is mostly quiet farming and coal country, with one violent footnote. In nineteen ninety a powerful tornado tore through town, and decades earlier the great Tri State Tornado of nineteen twenty-five passed close by but spared it.