Famous Citizens:

Louisa May Alcott
American author Louisa May Alcott was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania in 1832. At the age of 2, her family moved to Massachusetts. After her father’s unsuccessful business ventures in Boston, Louisa began writing and selling children’s fiction to provide income for her family. She is best known for her novel Little Women whose characters are patterned after Louisa and her sisters.

 

 

Daniel Boone
The frontiersman and American hero, Daniel Boone, was born near Reading, Pennsylvania in 1734. When he was 16 years old, he and his family moved to North Carolina, but Daniel returned to Pennsylvania in 1755 and fought in the French and Indian war under British General Edward Braddock. By the 1760s, Boone had found his way into the Kentucky region. Literary writers such as Lord Byron and James Fenimore Cooper wrote about Boone’s many adventures in this part of the country and soon the legendary frontiersman become known around the world.

 

 

James Buchanan
James Buchanan, the 15th President of the United States (1857-1861), was born in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania in 1791. After graduating from college, he established a successful law practice, earning more than $300,000 by the time he was thirty years old. Buchanan was engaged to married in 1819, but his bride-to-be broke off the engagement due to a misunderstanding. Buchanan he remained a bachelor for the rest of his life.

The wealthy and conservative Buchanan spent forty years in public service, as a congressman, senator, Minister to Russia under President Jackson, Secretary of State under President Polk, and Minster to England under President Pierce. He received his party’s Democratic nomination upon his return from Great Britain. He was sixty-five years old.

His Republican rival in the presidential race of 1856 was a young, energetic, liberal senator from California, John Charles Frémont. Backed heavily by the industrial and financial interest of the North, Buchanan won the electoral vote, but not the popular majority.

Buchanan lacked the energy and decisiveness that was required to lead a country torn by the issue of slavery. After the Dred Scott decision of 1857, a storm of protest erupted against the Supreme Court and the Buchanan administration. As southern states began to separate from the Union, Buchanan maintained that these slave states had no legal right to secede; yet he felt that the government had no right to intervene in the states’ rebellion.

After leaving office in 1861, Buchanan retired to his family home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania where he died in 1868.

 

 

Rachel Louise Carson
Born in Springdale, Pennsylvania in 1907, Rachel Louise Carson became a highly respected marine biologist and author. All of her writings are based on ecological themes. She became famous for her environmental concerns on the use of chemical pesticides. Her 1962 book Silent Spring led to the banning of DDT.

 

 

Stephen Collins Foster
Stephen Collins Foster, considered to be the first professional songwriter in the United States, was born in Lawrenceville, Pennsylvania in 1826. His first hit was Oh! Susanna. Many of his best-known songs were written between 1850 and 1860. Although he only made one trip to the south, Foster wrote lyrics that touch upon southern plantation life before the Civil War. Despite his popularity, Foster received little income for his work and he died penniless in 1861.

 

 

Henry Heinz
One of America’s most well known food-manufacturing corporations is the H.J. Heinz Company. Its founder, Henry John Heinz, was born in Pittsburgh in 1844. Heinz started out in the food business by grating and selling horseradish roots from door to door. By 1876 he was selling prepared food, including his famous ketchup. By 1888, his business became known as the Heinz Company.

 

 

B. F. Skinner
Born Burrhus Frederic Skinner in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania, Skinner attended Hamilton College and majored in English. He became interested in behavioral psychology after reading the works of John Watson and Ivan Pavlov, and received a degree in psychology from Harvard in 1931. Skinner is best known for his experiments with operant conditioning, a process by which animals and humans can be “trained’ to behave in particular ways by consistently rewarding (or reinforcing) the desired behavior.

 

 

Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth, son of the famous illustrator N.C. Wyeth, was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania in 1917. Wyeth is one of the nation’s most significant and innovative painters of the second half of the 20th century. He is best known for his vivid and observant images of the land and people of Maine and Pennsylvania. His most famous painting, Christina’s World, hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. His son Jamie Wyeth, who was also born in Chadds Ford, is a famous painter best known for his portraits of well-known people.