(Located on the comer of Clarion and Bridge Streets, on the southeast comer of property now occupied by the Sinclair Oil Plant. The present monument does not mark the exact spot occupied by the Academy building.)
Shortly after the close of the Civil War, a Soldiers' Orphans' School was established in Monaca, Pennsylvania for the education of the orphans resulting from that conflict. The students roomed and boarded at the institution, as well as attended classes. Professor Scudder Hart Piersol, a noted educator of Beaver County, had been teaching in a school in Kansas. lie returned East and became Principal of the newly organized school. It stood on the river bluff overlooking the Ohio, almost directly opposite the mouth of the Beaver River. This building burned down in 1876, and Professor Piersol, after an interval of a year, established an Academy at Bridgewater in 1878. It was a two-story frame structure about the size of a small dwelling. Professor Piersol died in 1903 and the institution passed away with him.
For years the budding stood vacant until the late Frank Kidd had it remodeled for use as a private home. It was finally demolished by the Sinclair Oil Company in January, 1957 in order to obtain an entrance gate and parking space on a corner of their property.
Professor Piersol's second wife, a Miss Mary Chambers, was a teacher in the Soldiers' Orphans' School during a portion of his tenure there. She died in 1902.
Piersol's Academy was a well and favorably known institution in the Beaver Valley.