The Powell Name in Cranberry
The Powell family's connection to Cranberry Township stretches back to the 19th century. In the 1883 county history, Joseph West -- who settled in Cranberry from Beaver County in 1863 -- is recorded as having married Maria Powell, of Beaver County. 1 Their son Fleming West became one of the township's prominent citizens, serving as an elder at Crestview Presbyterian Church and holding various township offices. 2 The intertwining of the Powell and West families reflected the tight kinship networks that defined Cranberry's agricultural community.
William Powell's Farm
In 1945, William Powell purchased a 71-acre farm in Cranberry Township. 3 At that time, the township's population was barely 1,000, and the landscape was much as it had been for over a century -- rolling farmland, dotted with the descendants of the families who had first cleared the forest in the late 1700s. In 1916, 137 of the township's 180 property owners were farmers. 4
William's son, Denton Powell, took up the work his father had begun. He worked the land continuously, maintaining it as a functioning farm even as the world around it was utterly transformed. Through the decades of Cranberry's explosive suburban growth -- the Fernway Plan of 1957, the construction of I-79 in 1971, the arrival of Westinghouse in 2009 -- Denton Powell kept plowing, planting, and harvesting.
The Last Working Farm
As Cranberry's population surged from 1,045 in 1950 to over 33,000 by 2020, farmland disappeared beneath subdivisions, shopping centers, and corporate campuses. 4 5 The Powell Farm became something increasingly rare: a working agricultural parcel in a township where the median household income exceeded $125,000 and the landscape was defined by the steel-and-glass architecture of Cranberry Woods Business Park.
Cranberry Township supported Denton Powell's mission to keep his farm undisturbed during his lifetime. Powell secured an agricultural easement in the early 2000s, and the township supported his efforts to obtain agricultural protection and conservation status. 3
In December 2021, Denton Powell died. After his passing, the farm fell silent for the first time in nearly 150 years. 3
A Gift to the Township
Andy Hack, a lifelong friend of Powell's and executor of his will, brought the farm's future before the Cranberry Township Board of Supervisors on March 2, 2023. He gifted the entire 71-acre property to the township. 3 It was one of the most significant land acquisitions in township history.
The gift represented far more than acreage. The Powell Farm is one of the last agricultural parcels in a community that was overwhelmingly farmland within living memory. It embodies the tension at the heart of Cranberry's modern identity: a place that celebrates its agricultural heritage while building a suburban future at breakneck speed.
A Living Monument
The township envisions Powell Farm as "a financially sustainable and independent space," an educational resource for residents and schools, and what officials have described as "a living, active monument to the Township's 200-year history in agriculture." 3 The goal is not to freeze the farm in time, but to create a bridge between Cranberry's past and its present -- a place where children growing up in subdivisions built on former cornfields can see what this land looked like before the interstates came.
In 2025, township officials approved a master plan for the property's development, including agricultural education programs, community garden spaces, and historical preservation features. 3 The farm now sits alongside the township's other recreational and cultural assets -- Graham Park, Cranberry Highlands Golf Course, the UPMC Lemieux Sports Complex -- as part of the community infrastructure that gives Cranberry its identity. 6
The Cranberry Plan, the township's comprehensive development framework that won the 2009 Daniel Burnham Award from the American Planning Association, emphasizes "Building a Better Connected Place." 6 Powell Farm may be the most powerful connection of all: 71 acres of soil linking 33,000 suburban residents to the farming families who first broke ground here over two centuries ago.
Standing on the Powell Farm today, looking across fields that Denton Powell tended until the end of his life, one can still imagine the landscape that greeted Mathew Graham when he arrived in 1796 -- forest giving way to cleared land, Brush Creek winding through the valley, and the quiet certainty that the soil would provide. That continuity, in a township defined by relentless change, is the farm's greatest gift.