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Cranberry Township, Butler County, Pennsylvania
Summary
Cranberry Township is a municipality in Butler County, Pennsylvania. The population was 33,087 as of the 2020 census. Cranberry Township is one of the fastest-growing areas of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.
In 1753, George Washington, then 21, was working for the Virginia Colony's British governor and hiked through what is now Cranberry Township along the Venango Path. His assignment was to deliver a message to the commander of the rival French Fort LeBoeuf that ordered the French to withdraw from northern Pennsylvania. The commander rejected the order, precipitating the French and Indian War, which the British and their colonies ultimately won but at a great cost.
The township's name derives from the wild cranberries that were abundant along the banks of Brush Creek prior to the 20th century. For centuries, the cranberries had attracted deer, which, in turn, attracted Native American hunters. However, drought and farming combined to eliminate the township's namesake fruit by the 1880s. When the township was originally chartered in 1804, it had a substantially larger area than it has now. In 1854, its boundaries were redrawn, reducing Cranberry from 81 to 25 square miles. Although the Iroquois, the Delaware, and Seneca nations had hunted and fished in the Cranberry area for centuries, the first European settlers, Mathew and William Graham, arrived in 1796. There, the brothers both acquired 200 acres of land that Benjamin Franklin had designated as part of the nation's Depreciation Land program, used to pay Revolutionary War soldiers with land, which was abundant, rather than in cash, which was scarce.
Over the following decades, the Graham family and Samuel Duncan, another early settler, opened a tavern, a distillery, a sawmill, and a grist mill. In 1806, Graham began the community's first church, the Plains Church, now the Plains United Presbyterian Church, which remains an active congregation. Descendants of the Graham family continue to reside in the community, which is sometimes confused with the homonymous Cranberry Township in Venango County (formerly Fairfield Township, founded 1806), a much smaller community away.
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