Perhaps the highest expression
First noted by travelers (who were also surveyors) George Washington, Christopher Gist and Thomas Hutchins, it was inevitable that the broad plateau at the meeting of the Ohio and Beaver Rivers would become a town. In the ten years of the life of Fort McIntosh, the officers and men who garrisoned it (and its visitors) wrote of the area's potential. General Lachlan McIntosh before he arrived at Fort Pitt knew of the place and made a bee-line for it.
As a consequence, in 1785 Alexander McLean, in laying out the Beaver Reserve from the Depreciation Lands, noted on his map the fine possibilities of the site. The legislature apparently followed his advice, for in 1791 it laid out a town with wide streets and areas dedicated to public use established in the center and four corners. At almost the same time legislation was enacted providing for a water system, and shortly afterwards for the financing, through the sale of certain lands, of an educational system.
The first town lots were sold in 1793 and by 1796 a visitor listed six houses and a tavern, the latter run by Abner Lacock, who became the county's first U. S. Senator. This tavern would be used for the first church services and also for the first court.
Perhaps the highest expression
of elegance in Beaver was the
clock tower of the "old" court
house.
Close examination of the present day
court house reveals how it was redesigned and
rebuilt on the foundations of the earlier building.
Until its unfortunate destruction by fire in 1932,
the Victorian architecture of the old court house
stood as a classic example of its time.
The still-standing law office of the late Sam B. Wilson,
said to be the oldest law -office building in the Commonwealth
of Pennsylvania in continuous use.