Clarion, Pennsylvania: Named for Its River

Clarion gets its name from the river running beside it, and by tradition the river got its name from early settlers who said its clear, swift current rang like a clarion trumpet over the rocks. Clarion County was carved from Venango and Armstrong counties on March eleventh, eighteen thirty-nine, and the new county needed a seat. A surveyor laid out a town plot that fall, dividing it into town lots and larger out-lots, and the first public lot sale followed.

The borough was formally incorporated in April of eighteen forty-one. It became home to what is now Clarion University, and the oil boom of the eighteen sixties sent money and workers flooding through the Clarion River valley, briefly making this small Western Pennsylvania county a center of the American petroleum world.