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Top Attractions in Beaver County

Captain William Vicary House

The Captain William Vicary House is a historic mansion in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, United States. Located at 1235 3rd Ave. in the borough of Freedom, the house lies along the communitys main street above the Ohio River. A Navy captain during the War of 1812, Vicary was rewarded by the government for his services with 500 acres of land in the Northwest Territory. After settling in Sewickley, Vicary met members of the Harmony Society, which had recently established Old Economy Village along the Ohio below Pittsburgh. Consequently, Vicary bought 604 acres of land near Economy, where he platted a community called "St. Clair" and began to build a stone mansion in 1826. Vicary employed local builders to use locally-mined sandstone to construct his house; it was completed in 1829 at a cost of over $4,000. Disputes with one of his builders led to a lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania and was not finally settled until after Vicarys death in 1842. Vicarys descendents lived in the house until 1912, but the house was not sold until 1924; after that date, it passed through a succession of owners before being condemned for the construction of Route 65 in the 1960s. A grassroots campaign resulted in its survival, and today the house is owned by Beaver County and occupied by the Beaver County Historical Research and Landmarks Foundation. In 1974, the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places for its architectural integrity. Significant aspects of the structure include its exterior and double chimneys; however, major modifications during the twentieth century included the removal of a large fireplace and the division of the house into apartments. The exterior stonework has been seen as particularly significant — the large stone blocks are believed to be the work of skilled masons, and are of a quality rarely seen in Western Pennsylvania in the early nineteenth century. A twentieth-century porch sits on the front of the mansion, and a cast iron fence surrounds the property. Today, the Vicary House is operated as a historic house museum.

Fort McIntosh

Fort McIntosh was an early American log frontier fort situated near the confluence of the Ohio River and the Beaver River in what is now Beaver, Pennsylvania. The fortress was constructed in 1778 under the direction of Lt. Col. Cambray-Digny, a French engineer, and named in honor of General Lachlan McIntosh. The fortress was the site of the signing of the Treaty of Fort McIntosh on January 21, 1785. It was occupied until it was abandoned in 1791. After the Revolution, the fort was the home of the First American Regiment, the oldest active unit in the United States Army. The fort was in the form of a trapezoid, about 150 feet on each side, with raised earthen bastions on each corner. Log palisades connected the bastions, and a 15 foot wide ditch protected three sides of the fort, with the 130 foot slope to the Ohio River protecting the other side. Inside were three barracks, warehouses, officers quarters, a forge, kitchen, and powder magazines. The fort may have had either two or four iron cannon. Around the year 1976, citizens of the nearby community of Beaver decided, with great fanfare, to excavate the pilings and remaining stone foundations of the original Ft. McIntosh. They were successful in locating the outlines of the revolutionary era fort. Their efforts culminated in a dedication, presided over by retired Gen. William Westmoreland, in the summer of 1977. In late 2010, a local business owner donated money for a granite and sandstone memorial on the fort site. The fort site was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975. In 1996, most of Beaver was listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the "Beaver Historic District. At that time, the fort site was singled out as one of the most significant of the districts 1,250 contributing properties. The Beaver Area Heritage Foundation protects the restored site, which features granite monuments and bronze plaques, as well as the original stone footers of the walls and fireplaces.

William B. Dunlap Mansion

The William B. Dunlap Mansion is a historic house in Bridgewater, Pennsylvania, United States. Erected in 1840 on a bluff over the Beaver River in the northern part of the borough, it has been ranked as the grandest and best-preserved 19th-century house in Bridgewater. The mansion was built for coffee entrepreneur James Arbuckle, whose architect employed the Greek Revival style of architecture. Arbuckle lived in the house until 1865, when he sold it to Samuel R. Dunlap and his family. Among the mansion's new residents was Samuel's son William, who ran his river transportation business from the house. Upon Samuel's death in 1890, the house passed into William; he continued to reside at the property until his own death in 1922. During these years, the house was the home of a public official: William was elected to represent the 46th District in the Pennsylvania State Senate in 1890, and he remained in this position until his death. After his death, the house passed through the hands of few owners; it changed ownership very few times and was only rarely vacant, and thus it has seen less change than most period houses. Except for a period as the home of a veterans' organization, the mansion has always been used as a residence, although would-be buyers sought to convert it into offices or a print shop. Dunlap's mansion is a three-story brick structure built on a stone foundation, with four large chimneys and a cedar interior. Although the house is currently surrounded by a lawn and shrubs, it was once surrounded by a formal garden that may have been larger than any other such garden in western Pennsylvania. On August 29, 1980, the house was added to the National Register of Historic Places for its architecture and for its association with William B. Dunlap. It is also a contributing property to a historic district, the Bridgewater Historic District, which was listed on the National Register in 1996.

Bridgewater Historic District

The Bridgewater Historic District is a historic district in Bridgewater, Pennsylvania, United States. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 28, 1996, it includes buildings built between 1818 and 1933, although the most significant buildings in the district are those that were built before the Civil War in the 1860s. Located at the confluence of the Ohio and Beaver Rivers, Bridgewater was a transportation center as the terminus of the Bridgewater Canal during the pre-Civil War era. This prosperity is reflected in many of the district's buildings: the adjacent communities of Beaver and Rochester were less significant during that time, and accordingly have a much smaller number of period buildings. The district includes the Bridgewater-Rochester Bridge, a canal lock for the Bridgewater Canal, and 97 buildings. Among its contributing properties are three churches, the Keystone Bakery, and the William B. Dunlap Mansion, which is separately listed on the Register. Because the bridge spans the Beaver River to Rochester, a small portion of the district is located in Rochester. Another building in the district is the house of Joseph Hemphill, a local landowner who platted much of Bridgewater in 1818. Built in 1818, it is Bridgewater's oldest extant house. During Bridgewater's heyday, Bridge Street was a vibrant downtown street. Its buildings housed a wide variety of businesses, ranging from offices to stores to metalworking shops. Among the leading businesses of Bridge Street, the Keystone Bakery, was once the largest bakery in Western Pennsylvania outside of Pittsburgh and Allegheny. Now located on Market Street, Keystone left Bridge Street in 1884 because of its rapid expansion. The Bridgewater United Methodist Church was organized in 1839 and built its first building in the same year. Its current building, a Gothic Revival structure located on Market Street, was erected in 1907. First Presbyterian Church worships in a Romanesque Revival church at the western end of Bridge Street. The congregation was founded as the result of an 1845 split in the Presbyterian church in Beaver. Built in 1845 and remodelled several times since, the church remains in use to the present day.

Shippingport Atomic Power Station

The Shippingport Atomic Power Station was the world’s first full-scale atomic electric power plant devoted exclusively to peacetime uses. It was located near the present-day Beaver Valley Nuclear Generating Station on the Ohio River in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, United States, about 25 miles from Pittsburgh. Shippingport was created and operated under the auspices of Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, whose authority included a substantial role within the United States Atomic Energy Commission . Its design team was headed by Alvin Radkowsky. The reactor reached criticality on December 2, 1957, and aside from stoppages for three core changes, it remained in operation until October 1982. The first electrical power was produced on December 18, 1957 as engineers synchronized the plant with the distribution grid of Duquesne Light Company. The first core used at Shippingport originated from a cancelled nuclear-powered aircraft carrier and used highly enriched uranium as "seed" fuel surrounded by a "blanket" of natural U-238, in a so-called seed-and-blanket design; in the first reactor about half the power came from the seed. The first Shippingport core reactor turned out capable of an output of 60 MWe one month after its launch. The second core was similarly designed but more powerful, having a larger seed. The highly energetic seed required more refueling cycles than the blanket in these first two cores. The third and final core used at Shippingport was an experimental, light water moderated, thermal breeder reactor. It kept the same seed-and-blanket design, but the seed was now Uranium-233 and the blanket was made of Thorium. Additionally, being a breeder reactor, it had ability to transmute relatively inexpensive Thorium to Uranium-233 as part of its fuel cycle. The breeding ratio attained by Shippingports third core was 1.01. Over its 25-year life, the Shippingport power plant operated for about 80,324 hours, producing about 7.4 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity. Owing to the aforementioned peculiarities, some non-governmental sources label Shippingport a "demonstration PWR reactor" and consider that the "first fully commercial PWR" in the US was Yankee Rowe. Criticism centers on the fact that the Shippingport plant had not been built to commercial specifications. Consequently, the construction cost per kilowatt at Shippingport was about ten times those for a conventional power plant.

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