Big Beaver, Pennsylvania

Big Beaver sits in northern Beaver County, in the Beaver River drainage, in a county named for the Beaver River. Settlers arrived in the seventeen nineties, and the township stayed rural until the railroad came through in eighteen fifty-one. Organized as a township in eighteen oh two, and made a borough after a residents' vote in nineteen fifty-eight, Big Beaver was modest in size but surrounded by serious industry.

Nearby Rochester and Beaver Falls drove steel and pottery manufacturing through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Big Beaver itself remained a small residential community. Its name, which strikes every visitor as pleasantly blunt, fits the beaver country of the surrounding Beaver River valley.