Waynesburg: Named for Mad Anthony, Seat of the Southernmost County

Greene County, tucked into the southwestern corner of Pennsylvania along the West Virginia border, was carved out of Washington County in seventeen ninety-six and named for General Nathanael Greene, the brilliant Rhode Island commander who helped secure the Southern theater of the Revolutionary War. The county needed a seat, and commissioners bought one hundred fifty-eight acres at the geographic center of the new county from a landowner named Thomas Slater for two thousand three hundred seventy-six dollars. They named the new town Waynesburg, in honor of General Anthony Wayne, the fiery Pennsylvania commander known to his contemporaries as Mad Anthony for his battlefield ferocity.

Wayne was still alive when the county was created and died later that same year. Waynesburg was incorporated as a borough in eighteen sixteen and grew steadily as a small agricultural and eventually coal-dependent community. It is the county seat and the largest of Greene County's six boroughs, and is home to Waynesburg University, a liberal arts institution founded in eighteen forty-nine by the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.