The Century Farm — Honoring a Century of Family Farming

In nineteen forty-nine, the Bradford County Historical Society, working from its offices in the courthouse annex right here in Towanda, launched something quietly revolutionary: the first Century Farm program in Pennsylvania. The idea was borrowed from New York's older Order of Century Farmers, and it was elegantly simple. If a family had owned and worked the same land for at least one hundred years, that farm deserved recognition.

Farm families across Bradford County lined up to claim the honor. The program resonated because it named something many rural Pennsylvanians felt deeply, that persisting on the land through drought and depression and generational change was itself an achievement worth marking.

The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture noticed. In nineteen seventy-six, the state adopted the Bradford County model and expanded it statewide. Since then, more than two thousand Pennsylvania farms have earned Century or Bicentennial Farm designations. What started as a local historical society's idea in a small north-central Pennsylvania county became the template for honoring farm families across the entire Commonwealth.