Cultivating Rurality in Northwestern Pennsylvania, 1975-1990

This essay explores the rural condition in Mercer County, Pennsylvania during the period between 1975 and 1990. Through an examination of written archival materials and oral history testimonies, a fluid expression of rural identity and community emerges from Mercer County’s rural and urban elements. Urban, industrial employment provided financial stability to individuals who did not want to compromise their desire for a rural lifestyle. The geographic integration of rural farmland and industrial towns facilitated routine movement between agricultural and industrial enterprises that revealed and reinforced a rural-urban work ethos, which ultimately shaped how individuals and communities conceived of their past, present, and even future. Industrial firms’ departures and downsizings revealed their exploitative nature and instigated generational shifts toward an older population. On the farm, these generational shifts helped preserve the agricultural landscape and minimize a sense of fading rurality, which was made possible by the perception of industry as external to “rural.” These findings revealed how urban and industrial markers can coalesce with rural ones to shape rural people’s identity and rural communities yet remain distinct from “rurality” in the eyes of rural people who rely on familiar rural markers to define the term.