Centre County Government

5. Penn State

View of State College from the top of Old Main in 1894. College Avenue crosses in the foreground.

But it was not Centre County's destiny to slide into the economic backwaters that turned other "Juniata Valley" counties into Pennsylvania's Appalachia. In part it was the wonderful limestone soil, almost proof against crop failures. Energetic William Waring, charged with turning Irvin's empty fields into a going college in three years, defended in January 1857 the selection of "remote" Centre County for the school over Berks and other clamoring sites:

John and Emanuel Houts rented a farm adjoining the School Farm in 1841. After farming 6 years they were able, from their share of the crops, to buy 70 acres of land, one mile west of the School Farm. They remained there 4 years, buying 50 acres more, then sold and purchased a 280-acre farm in the same range, on which they now live raising an annual average crop of 3,000 bu. com and proportional crops of wheat, and are in independent circumstances.

The agricultural ladder works when land is as good as that—share cropper to big farmer in 10 years! The Fosters had just bought nearby farms at $70 per acre, Waring adds.

However, it was the school Waring was managing and planting orchards and nurseries for that put Centre County on the map. Two students of the first class, on September 3, 1859, escorted Miss Catherine Baker in the first recorded visit to Penn State flower plots. Miss Baker's diary reads:

Sat. Sept. 3. Went to C. Struble's. in afternoon went to Farm School. Met Mr. Potts and Mr. Jordan and I had a nice time seeing sights. Was especially pleased with the flower gardens which were so beautiful and in good shape. Stayed there till nearly sundown.

With the intrusion of the Civil War followed by several decades of identity crisis, the fledgling college languished from 110 students in 1860 to 59 in 1870, crept back only to 157 in 1880, and still just 209 in 1890. President George Atherton's exertions to make Pennsylvania State College rank among the ten largest undergraduate engineering schools in the nation doubled the student body by 1900 and quadrupled that figure to 1,662 in 1910. With returning soldiers after World War I, the GI Bill soldiers after World War II, and Baby Boom enrollments since 1965, the now-University student body doubled every 20 years since 1920 to reach 32,000 by 1980, then climbed much more slowly to 43,000 today. Since 1950 students have numbered within a point or so of half the Centre Region population.

These students, and the thousands of faculty who teach them and guide their research, have increasingly transformed the county's character. No longer "of" the county, they form a community with direct links to every nation in the world. Beginning with a large contingent of Indonesians immediately after World War 11, foreign students from Central Africa, China, India, Iran, Eastern Europe, Central and South America have invigorated the cultural flavor of College Avenue and the conversations in its restaurants and coffee houses. High-tech factories, spun off from Penn State research, market their products in trade fairs the world over. Many research students and their professors can give directions to neighborhoods in Budapest, Nuremberg, Paris, Sidney and Singapore more readily than to Aaronsburg, Snow Shoe or Howard.

Powered by the University, State College and its surrounding townships enter the County's third century with a wage-scale, quality of life and diversity of culture that place Happy Valley residents—academic, high-tech, and professional—in a global economic context more immediate to them than the valleys surrounding their homes.