Lock Haven, Pennsylvania

Lock Haven is the county seat of Clinton County, in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It is located near the confluence of the West Branch Susquehanna River and Bald Eagle Creek. The earliest settlers in Pennsylvania arrived from Asia between 12000BCE and 8000BCE.

About Lock Haven, Pennsylvania in brief

Summary Lock Haven, PennsylvaniaLock Haven is the county seat of Clinton County, in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. It is located near the confluence of the West Branch Susquehanna River and Bald Eagle Creek. Built on a site long favored by pre-Columbian peoples, Lock Haven began in 1833 as a timber town and a haven for loggers, boatmen, and other travelers. The city has three sites on the National Register of Historic Places—Memorial Park Site; Heisey House, a Victorian-era museum; and Water Street District, an area with a mix of 19th- and 20th-century architecture. The earliest settlers in Pennsylvania arrived from Asia between 12000BCE and 8000BCE, when the glaciers of the Pleistocene Ice Age were receding. In the early 18th century, a tribal confederacy known as the Six Nations of the Iroquois, headquartered in New York, ruled the Indian tribes of Pennsylvania, including those who lived near what would become Lock Haven. In 1778, the British transferred most of the remaining Indian territory in the state to the United States, including Lock Haven, through the Treaty of S.R.I. The last remaining tract of land was acquired through the Erie Triangle, through which the last remaining Indian people, the Munsee, left the state in 1784. The Treaty of Fort Stanwix, signed in 1768, gave the British control of lands south of West Branch, but white settlers continued to appropriate land, including tracts in and near the future site of Lock Haven,.

In 1769, Cleary Campbell, the first white settler in the area, built a log cabin near the present site ofLock Haven University of Pennsylvania; by 1773 William Reed, another settler, had built a cabin surrounded by a stockade and called it Reed’s Fort. In 1833, Fort Augusta was the westernmost of 11 mostly primitive forts along West Branch; Fort Augusta, located by the East and West branches of what is now the Susqueshanna at Sunbury, was the easternmost and most defensible. During the French and Indian War, colonial militiamen on the Kittanning Expedition destroyed Munsee property on the Great Island and along theWest Branch. By 1763, themunsee had abandoned their island villages and other villages in the region. The Munsee were temporarily abandoned in 1778 during the general evacuation of the Big Runaway, known as a general evacuation as a Big Runaways. A levee, completed in 1995, protects the city from further flooding. About a third of the city’s workforce is employed in education, health care, or social services. A light-aircraft factory, a college, and a paper mill, along with many smaller enterprises, drove the economy. Frequent floods, especially in 1972, damaged local industry and led to a high rate of unemployment in the 1980s. The city’s population was 9,772 at the 2010 census; it is the principal city of the Lock Haven Micropolitan Statistical Area.