In 1916, the American Agriculturalist surveyed Cranberry Township and counted 180 property owners. Of those, 137 — more than three out of four — listed their occupation as farmer. 1 A century later, there was exactly one working farm left. Its owner had just died, and his last wish was that the land never be developed.
The story between those two facts is the story of American suburbanization. But it is also a story about food: how it was grown, processed, and traded on the western Pennsylvania frontier, and what the landscape tasted like before the strip malls arrived.
The Cranberry Bogs
Start with the name. Cranberry Township was not named by a developer’s marketing firm. It was named for the fruit. Wild cranberries grew thick in the marshes and bogs along Brush Creek and its branches, in the low-lying wetlands that characterized the southern portion of the township. The berry was abundant enough to become the defining feature of the place when the township was organized in 1804. 2
The cranberries did not survive. As settlers cleared the forest and drained the wetlands for farmland, the bogs shrank. Drought finished what agriculture had started. By the 1880s, the township’s namesake fruit had vanished from the landscape entirely. 2 Today, no wild cranberry grows in Cranberry Township. The name is the only evidence they were ever there.
Seven Men and a Mattock
The pioneers who arrived in 1796 were not gentlemen farmers. They were men with axes and mattocks, hacking a living from old-growth forest. Benjamin Johnson, Matthew and William Graham, John Henry, Alexander Ramsey, Paul Vandivort, and Samuel Duncan — these seven constituted the entire population of what would become Cranberry Township. 3
The work of turning forest into farmland was brutal. James Magee, who settled on the Connoquenessing Valley lands in 1797, “put in his first crop by the aid of a mattock” — a hand tool, somewhere between a pickaxe and a hoe, swung into ground still tangled with roots. 4 There were no plows, because there were no cleared fields to plow. There were no roads, because there were no towns to connect.
What these men grew in their first clearings was what they needed to survive: corn, wheat, rye, and oats. They raised hogs that could forage in the forest, cattle for milk and meat, and sheep for wool. The soil, Brown’s 1895 county history notes, was excellent — the township “abounds in well tilled and productive farms and in thrify and prosperous farmers” — but getting anything to market was another matter entirely. 3
The Waterman history of 1883 captures the problem vividly: “The soil, which had held in reserve the accumulated richness of unnumbered centuries, produced splendid harvests. Progress, however, was slow. Produce brought low prices, and it was difficult to place it in the market. The pioneer farmer who drew a load of wheat or corn to Pittsburgh, making the round trip in from four days to a week or more, could obtain only a few small articles in exchange for his grain, and paid dearly for them.” 4
Four days to Pittsburgh and back, over a road that was barely more than the old Venango Path — the same Indian trail George Washington had traveled in 1753. A farmer who hauled a wagonload of wheat eighty miles and spent a week doing it might return with a sack of salt, a few yards of cloth, and not much else.
The Distiller’s Solution
The economics of the frontier produced a logical answer: don’t haul the grain. Distill it.
Whiskey was the universal currency of western Pennsylvania. A bushel of rye or corn, bulky and perishable, might fetch a pittance in Pittsburgh after days of transport. But distill that bushel into whiskey — compact, durable, and universally desired — and you had something worth carrying. On a frontier where hard money was practically nonexistent, whiskey served as legal tender, accepted for debts, taxes, and trade. 5
Samuel Duncan understood this. Among the first settlers of 1796, he erected a saw mill on Brush Creek before 1803 — the earliest industry in the township. 3 But his second enterprise was the one that earned a reputation. Duncan “also ran a little distillery in the early days,” Brown records, “which obtained a wide reputation for the fine quality of the whisky turned out.” 3
Duncan was hardly alone. Across Butler County, the 1804 tax records list distillers and stillhouses with remarkable frequency. John Cratty, James Hemphill, Robert Hays, William McCandless — the names cascade through the rolls, one distiller for roughly every fifteen farms across the county. 3 The Waterman history paints the scene with relish: “During the early years of the settlement, whisky was in common use, and was furnished on all festive occasions. Nearly every settler who could afford it had a barrel stored away, and there were very few so poor that they could not have at least a jugful.” 4
The whiskey itself was remembered with near-religious reverence by old-timers interviewed decades later. Waterman describes it as “the good old-fashioned whisky — ‘clear as amber, sweet as musk, smooth as oil’ — that the octogenarians and nonogenarians of to-day recall to memory with an unctuous gusto, and a smack of the lips which entirely outdoes the descriptive power of words.” 4
The Whiskey Rebellion of 1794 — that explosive confrontation between frontier distillers and the federal excise tax — had been fought just two years before Duncan arrived, and just fifty miles south. The farmers of western Pennsylvania had made their position clear: you could tax their grain, but you would not tax their whiskey without a fight. By the time Duncan set up his still on Brush Creek, the rebellion was over and the tax grudgingly accepted, but the economic logic that drove it — distill or starve — still governed frontier life.
Graham’s Mill
The other transformative food infrastructure came in 1833, when Matthew Graham built the first grist mill on Brush Creek — the first in the entire township. 3 Before that, any farmer who wanted his grain ground into flour had to haul it to the nearest mill, which might be a full day’s journey each way.
Graham was already the township’s most prolific builder. He had established the Black Bear tavern on the Pittsburgh and Mercer road in 1813. In 1831, he erected a saw mill on the creek. The grist mill, two years later, completed a triangle of essential services: shelter for travelers, lumber for construction, and flour for bread. 3
A grist mill was not a luxury. It was the difference between eating raw grain and eating bread. Before Graham’s mill, Cranberry Township’s families either ground their own grain by hand — tedious, time-consuming work that produced coarse, uneven meal — or spent days making the round trip to a distant mill. The arrival of a grist mill within the township meant that the basic act of feeding a family no longer required a journey.
The Agricultural Peak
By the middle of the nineteenth century, Butler County was producing food on an impressive scale. The 1880 agricultural census recorded 192,843 bushels of wheat, 1,095,612 bushels of oats, 773,333 bushels of corn, 150,508 bushels of buckwheat, 117,627 bushels of rye, and 473,513 bushels of potatoes across the county. 6 There were 51,191 sheep, 40,145 hogs, and 26,051 cattle. 6
Cranberry Township was, by Brown’s assessment, “one of the best agricultural townships of the county.” 3 Coal mining and oil production brought additional income beginning in the 1860s — Freeport coal was found in the bed of Brush Creek, and the Henderson, Garvin, and Duncan oil fields returned “liberal profits” 3 — but farming remained the backbone.
The Patrons of Husbandry organized Grange Number 908, with thirty-four members who met in the hall on the Leise farm. 3 The Farmers’ Alliance maintained a presence. Brown notes that “to every organization, whether local or general, promising benefits to agriculturalists, her citizens have been always friendly.” 3
The 1916 survey tells the rest of the story: 137 farmers out of 180 property owners. The other occupations read like a catalog of rural village life — farm laborer, merchant, clerk, horse trainer, carpenter, butcher, blacksmith, bartender, oil driller, pumper, painter, streetcar conductor, electrician, and one civil engineer. 1 In 1918, the first tractor arrived in Cranberry Township, and the age of mechanized agriculture began. 1
The Vanishing
Cranberry Township’s population tells the story in numbers. In 1850, when it still encompassed eighty-one square miles, 2,236 people lived there. After the 1854 subdivision reduced it to its present size, the population dropped to 931 in 1860, then 945, then 988, then 909 in 1890. 3 For nearly a century, it hovered around a thousand souls.
Then the highways came. The Pennsylvania Turnpike in 1951. Interstate 79 in 1971. Interstate 279 in 1989. Each one punched a corridor through the old farmland, and each corridor filled with houses, then shopping centers, then corporate campuses. Westinghouse moved its nuclear division headquarters to Cranberry Woods in 2009. MSA Safety followed. Giant Eagle built its corporate headquarters in 2024. 2
The population exploded: 14,816 in 2000, 28,098 in 2010, 33,087 in 2020. 7 And with every new subdivision, another farm disappeared. The land that had held “the accumulated richness of unnumbered centuries” now held parking lots and cul-de-sacs.
The Last Farm
Denton Powell’s family had farmed seventy-one acres on Goehring Road since 1945. The Powell name appears in Cranberry Township records going back generations — H.K. Powell is listed among the township’s officers in the 1890s. 3 Denton worked the land his entire life, and in 2007, he secured an agricultural preservation easement through the Butler County program to ensure it would never be developed. 8
When Powell died in 2021, the farm fell silent. His lifelong friend Andy Hack honored Powell’s wish by donating the property to Cranberry Township. Bruce Hezlep, vice chairman of the Board of Supervisors, explained the township’s vision: “It will be green space and an opportunity for our residents to come and learn about our historical agricultural roots … this property will never be developed.” 8
The plans for Powell Farm read like an attempt to recover something of what was lost. The township intends to plant 1,700 apple trees and 500 peach trees of ten to twelve varieties, along with strawberry fields. 8 A farm caretaker position was funded with $100,000 from the 2025 budget. 8 It will be, in the township’s words, “a living, active monument to the Township’s 200-year history in agriculture.” 8
Two hundred years. From James Magee swinging a mattock into root-bound soil in 1797, to Samuel Duncan’s whiskey still on Brush Creek, to Matthew Graham’s grist mill, to the 137 farmers of 1916, to the 1,700 apple trees that will stand where the last farmer worked his last field. The cranberry bogs are gone. The distillery is gone. The Black Bear tavern is gone. But on seventy-one acres of Goehring Road, Cranberry Township is trying to remember what it was before the highways came.