Fayette City, Pennsylvania

Colonel Edward Cook founded this Monongahela River town around the turn of the nineteenth century and named it Freeport. Cook was a prominent landowner who had counted George Washington among his friends. The town changed its name to Cookstown in eighteen twenty-five to honor the colonel, then to Fayette City in eighteen fifty-four, a tribute to the Marquis de Lafayette.

Sitting on the east bank of the Monongahela, the borough passed through three economic lives: first a boat-building and farming community supplying river traffic, then a glass manufacturing center, and finally a coal powerhouse by the nineteen twenties. The river that made it has also defined its limits; Fayette City remains a compact borough of a few hundred residents, the Monongahela sliding past its front door.