The Borough That Went to College and Never Came Home

Rodger Morrow

Editor & Publisher, Beaver County Business

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Beaver County has lost mills, railroads, department stores and a statistically improbable number of useful bridges. It has also lost an entire borough.

College Hill Borough disappeared in 1930, though not in the dramatic fashion of Atlantis. There was no tidal wave, volcanic eruption or delegation from Harrisburg carrying a clipboard. It simply merged with Beaver Falls and became a neighborhood, which is what happens to small governments when they can no longer afford both a fire department and the stationery.

College Hill began, naturally enough, with a college. Geneva College had been founded in Northwood, Ohio, where the Rev. John Black Johnston started teaching Latin to seven young men in his study in 1837. The school expanded into a log building, began admitting women and eventually became Geneva Hall. Tuition was $8 a term, an amount modern college administrators could not charge without first adding a technology fee.

Geneva was unusually progressive in some respects. It became fully coeducational in 1865 and admitted formerly enslaved people that same year. It had also briefly served as a stop on the Underground Railroad. But Northwood was isolated, and isolation, while helpful for religious contemplation, is generally poor for enrollment.

In 1879, the Reformed Presbyterian Synod approved a move. The Harmony Society offered 10 acres on a hill north of Beaver Falls, while the local community raised $20,000. Classes began there in 1880, and Old Main was completed the following year. The first Pennsylvania graduating class consisted of six students, allowing the college president to shake every hand without developing bursitis.

A community soon accumulated around the campus. Houses appeared, followed by churches, shops and the usual conviction among residents that they could govern themselves better than the people presently doing it. In 1891, they petitioned the Beaver County court to separate from White Township. On May 2, 1892, College Hill Borough was born with a population of 322 and the confidence of a much larger place.

By 1900, it had nearly 900 residents. It operated its own schools, power plant, police and fire protection. Fourth Avenue offered Moretti’s Pharmacy, College Hill Bakery, Kelly Hardware and an Isaly’s, which meant the borough possessed medicine, bread, nails and chipped ham—the four pillars of Western Pennsylvania civilization.

Its first school stood at 33rd Street and Fourth Avenue. As enrollment grew, so did the building. Second-floor pupils escaped fires through enclosed metal tubes, sliding to safety in a system that must have produced more enthusiasm for fire drills than arithmetic.

The borough tried running a high school from 1908 to 1913, then decided secondary education was an extravagance best purchased wholesale from Beaver Falls. A tuition dispute in the 1920s briefly sent older students to New Brighton, proving that school-district quarrels have always been among our most durable forms of local entertainment. College Hill later built a

junior high on 37th Street, sometimes described as Pennsylvania’s first building designed specifically for that purpose. Adolescents had finally acquired their own institution, where they could be misunderstood together.

Transportation was plentiful. Streetcars climbed the hill toward Morado Park, where a Decoration Day picnic in 1903 attracted more than 15,000 people. The Pittsburgh & Lake Erie opened a passenger station around 1910, chiefly for students and residents. Two major railroads passed nearby, connecting this small college borough with the wider industrial world.

Geneva supplied its own share of excitement. The college played one of the earliest basketball games in 1893, carved its great “G” into the hillside in 1925 and defeated Harvard in football in 1926. This last event deserves emphasis. Harvard had money, prestige and centuries of accumulated self-regard. Geneva had Beaver County boys and a hill. The hill prevailed.

The campus was once surrounded by a cast-iron fence, reportedly because cows wandered freely through the neighborhood. This was an age when colleges protected students from livestock rather than unpopular opinions.

By the middle of the 1920s, however, College Hill’s finances had begun to fail the practical examination. The borough discontinued paid police and fire protection. Residents valued independence, but independence becomes less attractive when the fire truck has nobody to drive it.

In November 1928, College Hill and Beaver Falls voted on consolidation. The proposal passed in College Hill by only 53 votes—a narrow margin suggesting that nearly half the borough preferred insolvency with dignity. The merger took effect on January 1, 1930, and Beaver Falls became a third-class city. College Hill ceased to exist as a municipality after 37 years, eight months and just enough local controversy to establish its credentials as a genuine Beaver County government.

Yet it never entirely vanished. The name survives. The hill survives. Geneva remains at its center, still proclaiming Pro Christo et Patria—“For Christ and Country”—while freshmen maintain the great “G” above the valley.

College Hill is gone, in other words, except for nearly everything that made it College Hill.