Mercer, Pennsylvania: Named for a Revolutionary Martyr

Mercer is the borough seat of Mercer County in western Pennsylvania, laid out in eighteen oh three and formally incorporated in eighteen fourteen. The county and the borough are named for General Hugh Mercer, a Scottish-born physician who became one of George Washington's most valued commanders in the Revolutionary War. Mercer was mortally wounded at the Battle of Princeton on January third, seventeen seventy-seven, and died nine days later , a death that made him a martyr figure in the early republic. Born in Scotland in seventeen twenty-six, he studied medicine at Aberdeen and served as an assistant surgeon in the Jacobite army at Culloden before fleeing to Pennsylvania. He became a close friend of Washington and was bayoneted at Princeton after refusing to surrender.

The county's economy through the nineteenth century ran on iron and coal. The Shenango Valley became a major center of iron and steel production, and Sharon Steel employed thousands there before its decline in the late twentieth century. Today Mercer borough is a quiet county seat of about two thousand, but its red-brick courthouse square and Victorian commercial district preserve the scale and character of a western Pennsylvania county seat that was once fueled by iron. A nineteen forty mural in the post office, Clearing the Land by Lorin Thompson, was painted under a federal Treasury art program.