Hermitage, Pennsylvania: Steel Town That Changed Its Name
Near Youngstown, Pennsylvania
The city of Hermitage in Mercer County has an unusual civic history: it did not exist under that name until nineteen seventy-five, when residents voted to rename what had been Hickory Township. The area was first settled in seventeen ninety-six, incorporated as Hickory Township in eighteen thirty-two, and grew steadily as the Shenango Valley steel industry built up around it. The larger neighbor of Sharon anchored the valley's steel economy, with Sharon Steel Works , founded in eighteen ninety-six , employing thousands across the region for most of the twentieth century.
Sharon Steel went bankrupt in nineteen ninety-two after decades of decline in American steelmaking, and the Shenango Valley absorbed the loss like dozens of other Rust Belt communities. Hermitage, the residential and commercial side of that industrial economy, pivoted toward retail and healthcare. Today it is the largest city in Mercer County by population, a suburban community of about fifteen thousand with a heavily residential character built around Buhl Park, a private park donated to the public in nineteen twenty-two.
