Petersburg, Indiana: County Seat Named for a Settler

Pike County was created on December twenty-first, eighteen sixteen, named for Zebulon Pike, the explorer who led the famous expedition into the Southwest just a decade before statehood. The county commissioners filed their first report on February fifteenth, eighteen seventeen, designating Petersburg as the seat of government and ordering the town platted that same year. It was named for Peter Brenton, one of the original landowners on the site.

Coal shaped nearly everything that followed. Miners found seams beneath Pike County in the mid-eighteen hundreds, and by eighteen ninety-eight the county's mines were producing over two hundred forty thousand tons per year and employing four hundred men. Many small communities across the county rose and fell with the coal seams.

Petersburg endured as the county seat throughout, and today a major power generating station still operates here, though it is converting from coal to natural gas.