Greensburg: Born from Ashes on the Lincoln Highway

Greensburg, the county seat of Westmoreland County, exists because another town was burned to the ground.

The original seat of Westmoreland County was a frontier settlement called Hanna's Town, located a few miles north of here. It held the first English-speaking court west of the Allegheny Mountains, established in seventeen seventy-three, an outpost of colonial law in the forested Pennsylvania backcountry. But on July thirteenth, seventeen eighty-two, a raiding party of roughly one hundred Seneca warriors and sixty British-allied Canadian rangers swept down on the settlement. They burned most of Hanna's Town to the ground. It was one of the last hostile raids of the Revolutionary War on American soil, and it effectively ended the town.

The county needed a new seat. In seventeen eighty-five the choice fell to a small settlement growing up along the wagon road that linked Philadelphia to Fort Pitt. That settlement was named Greensburg, in honor of General Nathaniel Greene, one of Washington's most capable commanders. The town was formally incorporated as a borough in seventeen ninety-nine, and it became the first county seat and site of the first courts west of the mountains to survive into the modern era.

Greensburg sat along the great overland corridor through the Appalachians, and in nineteen thirteen, when Carl Fisher and the Lincoln Highway Association mapped the nation's first coast-to-coast automobile route, that corridor through Pennsylvania became part of the Lincoln Highway. US Route Thirty traces much the same path today.

The coal and railroad industries gave Greensburg its industrial character through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Westmoreland County Courthouse, with its mansard roof and Victorian clock tower, still anchors the downtown, a reminder that this small city's origins lie in the violent disruptions of a continent being contested.