Centre County Government

3. From Plantation to Industry

Ironmasters lived in stone Federalist houses and exercised paternal care over their iron communities like southern planters over their cotton plantations. They bestowed public benefactions with aristocratic aplomb. Philip Benner built for Judge Robert Walker the Linn house to live in, as long as he remained in Bellefonte, to lure the esteemed judge to spend a few more years in the village. Benner, Irvin, Curtin—all the iron barons—built good roads and contributed heavily to bring the Pennsylvania Canal to Bellefonte.

Labor was scarce, but you'd hardly believe it. Furnace and forge workers lived in small company houses- often boarded at the company kitchen, and nearly always enslaved themselves by debt to the company store. Job security worked both ways: it was as hard for workers to quit as for bosses to fire them. Largesse and token jobs were distributed to aged and disabled workers and their widows in return for their unswerving loyalty.

James Irvin (1800-1862)—Centre County's Andrew Carnegie, he donated original campus to Penn State. CCHS Collections.

This almost mediaeval social and work ethic in the county's leading industry yielded reluctantly as Centre County navigated from paternalism into capitalism, from plantations to big business. Gen. James Irvin cut a transitional course as ironmaster. Son of a county "stone-house" family, he married into another, taking to wife the daughter of U.S. Senator Andrew Gregg. Irvin bought his first half-interest in a furnace in 1832, owned three furnaces by 1840, 10 by 1854, and went bankrupt in the panic of 1857. His vision of public service widened as his iron holdings grew in number: In 1832 he had himself elected militia major-general (but never went to war). In 1840 he was elected to Congress, where he was instrumental in passing a protective tariff vital to the U.S. iron industry. In 1855 he, with Moses Thompson's help, offered the land of two farms for the Farm School that became Penn State—and in 1857 he made good on his crucial offer, despite the financial collapse engulfing him. He wrote in his offer letter:

If we would add dignity to manual labor, if we would have [labor] held in honor by the community, we must associate it with Science, and if we would lessen the expense of acquiring Scientific Knowledge, so as to bring the cost within the means of the farming community, we must connect the acquisition [of scientific knowledge] with manual labor—These as I understand are the leading objects of the Farmers High School of Pennsylvania...

The farms James Irvin gave are today the heart of the Penn State campus, bounded by College Avenue, North Atherton Street, Park Avenue and, roughly, University Drive.

Irvin's vision, coupled with his know-how, plunged Centre County irreversibly into its strenuous future.