Pennsylvania

Glaciers had retreated from the Pennsylvania area about 12,600 years ago, and warming that began around 10,000 years ago (8000 B.C.) gave the state’s rivers and coastlines their modern form. The earliest known human remains, found at Meadowcroft Rockshelter about thirty miles southwest of Pittsburgh, belong to a food-gathering culture probably 12,000 to 14,000 years old.⁠[1]

When Europeans arrived, Native American populations were small and widely scattered and belonged to two major language groups, Iroquoian and Algonkian; hunting and food gathering prevailed, though weaving, pottery and agriculture were also practiced. The Algonkian-speaking Lenape (Delawares) lived in the Delaware River basin; the Iroquoian-speaking Susquehannocks lived along the SusquehannaSusquehanna International GroupSusquehanna International Group (SIG) is a quantitative trading and market-making firm based in Bala Cynwyd, Pennsylvania, founded in 1987 by Jeff Yass and a group of college friends. Trading is its core business; it also works in institutional sales, private equity and prediction-market making, and was an early investor in ByteDance.Open the full entry and were destroyed as a nation by 1675 by disease, attacks by Marylanders and the Iroquois; the Eries lived along Lake Erie and were wiped out by the Iroquois around 1654; and groups of the Iroquois Confederacy, including the Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga and Oneida, lived in the north. The Algonkian-speaking Shawnees arrived from the west in the 1690s.⁠[1][2]

The English based their claims on the voyages of the Cabots (1497) and the French on Verrazano (1524), though it is uncertain whether any of these explorers reached land that became Pennsylvania. In 1608 John Smith traveled up the Susquehanna from VirginiaVirginiaVirginia, officially the Commonwealth of Virginia, is a U.S. state whose capital is Richmond. It entered the Union on June 25, 1788, as the 10th state, and had a population of 8,631,393 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry and visited the Susquehannocks; in 1609 Henry Hudson, an Englishman in Dutch service, sailed the Half Moon into Delaware Bay, giving the Dutch a claim to the area; and in 1610 Captain Samuel Argall of Virginia visited the bay and named it after Lord de la Warr. The Dutch set up trading posts from 1623, but not on Pennsylvania soil until 1647.⁠[1]

The Swedes made the first permanent settlement, beginning with the 1637–1638 expedition to the site of Wilmington, DelawareDelawareDelaware is a U.S. state in the Mid-Atlantic region on the East Coast, with its capital at Dover and Wilmington as its largest city. On December 7, 1787, it became the first state to ratify the U.S. Constitution, entering the Union as the 1st state, and it had a population of 989,948 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry. In 1643 Governor Johan Printz of New Sweden established his capital on Tinicum Island, now in Pennsylvania. In 1655 Governor Peter Stuyvesant of New Netherland seized New Sweden and absorbed it into the Dutch colony. In 1664 the English seized the Dutch holdings in the name of the Duke of York, the king’s brother; apart from a Dutch recapture in 1673–1674, the region remained under the Duke’s jurisdiction until 1681, and the Duke of York’s Laws, introduced in 1676, brought English law and civil government.⁠[1][2]

On March 4, 1681, King Charles II signed the Charter of Pennsylvania, granting land to William Penn in repayment of a debt the king owed to PennUniversity of PennsylvaniaThe University of Pennsylvania, commonly called Penn, is a private research university and Ivy League member in Philadelphia. It traces its origins to a 1740 charity-school project; Benjamin Franklin proposed his academy in 1749, classes began in 1751, and a 1791 merger established the institution under its present name. Penn has 12 schools, with undergraduate education concentrated in arts and sciences, engineering, nursing and Wharton. Enrollment totaled 29,384 in fall 2025, and the fiscal 2025 endowment was $24.81 billion. As of October 2026, J. Larry Jameson was president, with his term scheduled to end on June 30, 2027.Open the full entry’s father, Admiral Sir William Penn; it was proclaimed on April 2, 1681. The colony was named for the admiral, with “sylvania” (woodlands) added at the son’s request. The charter set the boundaries between the 39th and 42nd parallels and five degrees of longitude west of the Delaware River; colonists kept the protections of English law, but the king could annul provincial statutes.⁠[3][2]

Penn intended the colony as a refuge for Quakers and sent William Markham to secure the claim and set its boundaries. The state government describes Pennsylvania as “founded in 1681 as a place of tolerance and freedom.”⁠[2][4]

In 1682 the Duke of York deeded Penn his claim to the three lower counties on the Delaware. Penn drafted the First Frame of Government in England, arrived in October 1682 aboard the Welcome, laid out Philadelphia as the capital and created the three original counties. The first General Assembly met at Chester on December 4, 1682; it united the Delaware counties with Pennsylvania, passed a naturalization act and on December 7 adopted the Great Law, guaranteeing liberty of conscience. The second Assembly, in 1683, amended the First Frame with Penn’s cooperation, producing the Second Frame of Government.⁠[3]

Penn treated Native Americans fairly, and they responded with friendship. When he returned to England in 1684, the province had an established government and religious toleration.⁠[2][3]

After the English Revolution of 1688, Penn lost his province from 1692 to 1694, and Markham’s Frame of Government of 1696 gave the Assembly additional powers. Before leaving for England in 1701, Penn agreed with the Assembly on the Charter of Privileges, which gave the Assembly full legislative powers, allowed the Delaware counties a separate legislature and made religious liberty absolute and irrevocable; it remained in effect until 1776.⁠[3]

Delaware leaders resented Pennsylvanian domination. In 1704 Governor Gookin convened a separate Delaware Assembly, which lasted until 1776; the two colonies shared a governor until 1776, when both became states and the connection ended.⁠[3]

Scotch-Irish immigrants arrived in waves from about 1717 until the Revolution, mainly as frontiersmen moving into the Cumberland Valley and then central and western Pennsylvania; with immigrants from Scotland they made up about one-fourth of the population by 1776. German immigration increased after 1727, mostly from the Rhineland, and by the Revolution Germans formed about one-third of the population, concentrated in Northampton, Berks, Lancaster and Lehigh counties. About 4,000 enslaved people had been brought to Pennsylvania by 1730.⁠[3]

Pennsylvania was a leading agricultural exporter, with wheat and corn as the main crops; manufacturing began with sawmills and gristmills and expanded to textiles, shipbuilding, iron, printing, papermaking and tanning, and Lancaster County produced the Pennsylvania long rifle and the Conestoga wagon, which could carry about four tons. Philadelphia was called the “Athens of America” for its cultural life; an academy founded in 1740 became the College of Philadelphia in 1755 and later the University of Pennsylvania; and by 1776 Philadelphia was the largest English-speaking city in the world after London.⁠[3]

The French built forts at Erie, Waterford, Pittsburgh and Franklin, threatening the middle colonies. In 1754 they defeated George Washington’s militia at Fort Necessity; in 1755 General Edward Braddock’s army was destroyed on the Monongahela; and in 1758 General John Forbes recaptured the Pittsburgh site, where the French Fort Duquesne became Fort Pitt. Pontiac’s War followed, and in August 1763 Colonel Henry Bouquet defeated Native forces at Bushy Run; that year the Conestoga Indians in Lancaster County were massacred.⁠[3][2][1]

Penn and his heirs bought Native claims before settlement, and by 1768 all of Pennsylvania except the northwestern third had been purchased, including a large area bought from the Iroquois at the Treaty of Fort Stanwix that year; the Commonwealth bought the Six Nations’ remaining claims in 1784 and 1789 and the Delaware and Wyandot claims in 1785.⁠[3]

Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon surveyed the Pennsylvania–MarylandMarylandMaryland is a Middle Atlantic state of the United States, deeply indented by Chesapeake Bay and bordered by Pennsylvania, Delaware, Virginia, the District of Columbia and West Virginia; its capital is Annapolis and its largest city is Baltimore. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on April 28, 1788, as the seventh state to do so, and had a population of 6,177,224 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry line, which was marked in 1767 and approved in Britain in 1769, ending disputes dating from the 1681 charter; before the Civil War the line divided slave and free states. Pennsylvania accepted the 42nd parallel as its northern border with New York StateNew York (state)New York is a state in the eastern United States; its capital is Albany and its largest city is New York City. One of the original 13 states, it ratified the U.S. Constitution on July 26, 1788, becoming the 11th state to join the Union, and its population in the 2020 census was 20,201,249.Open the full entry, though surveying was delayed until 1787.⁠[3][2]

The First (1774) and Second (1775–1776) Continental Congresses met in Philadelphia at Carpenters’ Hall and the State House (Independence Hall), and the Declaration of Independence was signed there. In August 1775 a Pennsylvania rifle battalion joined the siege of Boston.⁠[2][5]

The 1777 campaign included the significant battles of Brandywine, Germantown and Whitemarsh; the British captured Philadelphia on September 22, 1777, and left in the spring of 1778 after the French alliance and the British defeat at Saratoga. Washington’s army wintered at Valley Forge from December 1777 to June 1778 and emerged reorganized and drilled, and Congress sat at York from October 1777 to June 1778, where it approved the Articles of Confederation.⁠[5]

After extralegal committees took control of the government, they called a state convention that met on July 15, 1776, and the constitution was adopted on September 28, 1776. It created a one-house Assembly and a Supreme Executive Council in place of a governor, and its Declaration of Rights passed into later state constitutions with little change. Conservative patriots such as John Dickinson and James Wilson opposed it, and the radical Constitutionalist government ruled until 1790.⁠[5]

The Pennsylvania Gradual Abolition Act of 1780 was the first emancipation statute in the United States. The 1790 census counted about 10,000 African Americans, about 6,500 of them free; the enslaved population fell from 3,737 in 1790 to 64 by 1840, by 1850 nearly all Black Pennsylvanians were free except fugitives from the South, and the free Black population rose from 6,500 in 1790 to 57,000 in 1860, with Philadelphia as its cultural center.⁠[3][5]

The Federal Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787 to remedy the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation. Pennsylvania sent eight delegates, four of whom had signed the Declaration of Independence; Benjamin Franklin, Gouverneur Morris and James Wilson were the most prominent, and Wilson was a principal architect of the Constitution. The delegation signed the finished Constitution on September 17, 1787. The state ratifying convention met in Philadelphia on November 21, 1787, where Federalists led by Wilson held a majority. The Constitution took effect on June 21, 1788, when the ninth state ratified it.⁠[5]

After the conservatives regained strength they rewrote the constitution: the convention that met in November 1789 produced the 1790 constitution, which created a State Senate as a second house and a stronger governor with broad appointment powers. In 1791 the State Supreme Court implied that it could void unconstitutional legislative acts, an early assertion of judicial review.⁠[5][2]

Philadelphia was the capital of the United States from 1790 to 1800. On March 3, 1792, President Washington issued the deed for the Erie Triangle, a lakefront area Pennsylvania gained through purchases from the Seneca chief Cornplanter in 1789 and 1791. In 1794 the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania was suppressed by an army assembled at Carlisle and Fort Cumberland under President Washington, and the Lancaster Pike was completed that year.⁠[5]

The seat of government moved to Lancaster in 1799 and to Harrisburg in 1812. In the War of 1812, Oliver Hazard Perry’s fleet, built at Erie by Daniel Dobbins, won the Battle of Lake Erie on September 10, 1813.⁠[5]

Large-scale anthracite mining began after 1820. By the Civil War Pennsylvania rolled about half the nation’s iron, and the Cambria Iron Works at Johnstown, founded in 1854, were the largest mills in the country by the war’s end; textile mills numbered more than 200 by 1860. The first city-wide central labor union was formed in Philadelphia in 1827.⁠[5]

By 1832 Pennsylvania led the nation in improved roads, with more than 3,000 miles. The State Works linked east and west by 1834 but nearly bankrupted the state; canal mileage peaked at 954 miles by 1840, and the Public Works were sold in 1857. Rail service began in 1827, and the Columbia and Philadelphia Railroad of 1834 was the first government-built railroad; the Pennsylvania Railroad was chartered on April 13, 1846, and reached Pittsburgh by 1852; and by 1860 the state had 2,598 miles of track, the most of any state.⁠[5]

The 1790 constitution called for free schooling for the poor, but only a paupers’ system resulted until the Free School Act of 1834 under Governor George Wolf; localities could initially opt out, and only about 51 percent joined at first. An 1849 act removed the opt-out right, and an 1854 act strengthened school districts and county superintendents and required separate schools for African American pupils where at least twenty were present, a provision repealed in 1881.⁠[5]

The 1838 constitution reduced the governor’s appointment powers, increased the number of elective offices and shortened terms, while free African Americans lost the right to vote; Pennsylvania Hall, a reform center in Philadelphia, was burned that year. Quakers were the first to organize against slavery; in 1847 the state barred the use of its jails to detain fugitive African Americans; and the Christiana Riot of 1851 resisted the federal Fugitive Slave Law. Lucretia Mott, Thaddeus Stevens and African American leaders such as James Forten and William Still were prominent in the antislavery cause.⁠[5]

In 1859 Edwin L. Drake drilled the world’s first successful oil well at Titusville. By 1891 Warren, Venango and McKean counties led production, and once transmission and burning methods were developed Pennsylvania also became a leading natural gas producer, to the benefit of the plate glass industry.⁠[2][6]

Nearly 350,000 Pennsylvanians served in the Union forces, including an estimated 8,600 African American volunteers. Asked by Lincoln for 14 regiments, the state supplied 25, and in May 1861 it created the 15-regiment Pennsylvania Reserve Corps. Eleven United States Colored Troops regiments and one independent company were raised at Camp William Penn between July 1863 and February 1865.⁠[6]

In June 1863 General Robert E. Lee moved about 75,000 men north; on July 1–3, 1863, they were defeated at Gettysburg by the Union army under General George G. Meade, nearly a third of which was made up of Pennsylvanians, in a major turning point of the war. On July 20, 1864, a Confederate force under General John McCausland burned Chambersburg after its residents refused to pay a ransom, leaving two-thirds of them homeless and causing almost two million dollars in damage.⁠[6]

The fourth state constitution responded to a nationwide reform movement and corrected the 1838 constitution; voters approved it by about 70 percent, and although the convention and vote took place in 1873, the title “Constitution of 1874” was adopted by act of the General Assembly. It lengthened the governor’s term from three to four years with no immediate re-election and gave the governor a line-item veto over appropriations; it doubled the legislature to a 200-member House and a 50-member Senate meeting every other year; it created a Lieutenant Governor and an elected Auditor General; and it removed the ban on African American voting.⁠[6]

Iron and steel was the state’s largest single industry, centered in western Pennsylvania. Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant, began building steel mills in Pittsburgh in 1873 and in 1901 sold Carnegie Steel to J.P. Morgan’s U.S. Steel; Charles M. Schwab later bought Bethlehem Steel. In 1900 Pennsylvania still produced 60 percent of the nation’s steel, a share that fell below 50 percent by 1916.⁠[6]

The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 peaked at the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Pittsburgh properties and was ended by federal troops; in the Homestead Strike of 1892 the Amalgamated Iron and Steel Workers were forced to capitulate to the Carnegie Company and Henry C. Frick, and steel was not effectively unionized until the late 1930s. The United Mine Workers formed in 1890, and after the 1897 massacre of protesting Slavic miners at the Lattimer Mine the union grew rapidly. In the 1902 anthracite strike President Theodore Roosevelt intervened, setting a pattern of non-violent arbitration; mine accidents killed an average of 525 workers a year between 1902 and 1920.⁠[6]

Settlers before 1861 came mostly from northern Europe, while later immigrants included Slavic, Italian, Finnish, Scandinavian and Jewish people; the decade 1900–1910 saw the largest population increase in the state’s history. African American migration from the South intensified after 1917 and again during World War II, and in 1940 Pennsylvania was the nation’s second most populous state, with about two-thirds the population of New York State.⁠[6]

Gifford Pinchot, elected governor in 1922, issued the Administrative Code of 1923, organizing 139 agencies into fifteen departments and three independent commissions, and in 1931 the state took over 20,156 miles of township roads. The Pennsylvania Turnpike, opened in 1940, was the first high-speed, multi-lane highway in the country. During the Great Depression unemployment reached 24 percent in November 1931 and 37 percent by 1933.⁠[6]

By June 1945, 1,171,127 Pennsylvanians had served or were serving in the armed forces, second only to New York State and about one in seven of all service members; the state produced 130 generals and admirals and more Medal of Honor recipients than any other state, and Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall was a native of Uniontown. Known as the “Arsenal of America,” Pennsylvania ranked sixth in total war production, fifth in shipbuilding and fourth in ordnance, and furnished almost one-third of the nation’s steel.⁠[6]

In 1950 Pennsylvania fell from second to third place among the states in population as California grew. The state’s steel production began contracting in 1963; the coal market began declining at the end of World War II as oil and natural gas replaced anthracite for heating, and the 1959 Knox Mine disaster in Luzerne County effectively ended deep mining across much of the anthracite region.⁠[7]

In 1962 the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central merged as Penn Central, a merger approved by the Interstate Commerce Commission in 1968; Penn Central went bankrupt in 1970, and the federal government formed Conrail in 1974, which became profitable in 1981 and was sold to private stockholders in 1987. Act 195 of 1970 gave public employees collective bargaining rights.⁠[7]

The Constitutional Convention of 1967–1968 revised the 1874 constitution: it added a provision prohibiting the denial of anyone’s civil rights, allowed the governor and other elected state officers to succeed themselves for one additional term, established a unified judicial system under the Supreme Court and created the Commonwealth Court, kept the uniformity clause that bars a graduated income tax, fixed the House at 203 members and limited state borrowing to 175 percent of average annual tax revenue except in certain emergencies. In 1971 voters amended the constitution so that equal rights could not be denied on account of sex, and a 1972 act declared the amended document the Constitution of 1968.⁠[7]

In March 1979 the Three Mile Island generating station near Middletown had an accident; the damaged unit’s core was later removed, leaving it inoperative, while the undamaged second unit continued producing power. In 2004 the state’s nine nuclear units at five sites produced 36 percent of its electricity, and nuclear waste is shipped to sites in South Carolina and UtahUtahUtah is a U.S. state bordered by Idaho to the north, Wyoming to the northeast, Colorado to the east, Arizona to the south and Nevada to the west, with its capital at Salt Lake City. It was admitted to the Union on January 4, 1896, as the 45th state, and the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) counted 3,271,616 residents.Open the full entry.⁠[7]

On September 11, 2001, United AirlinesUnited AirlinesUnited Airlines is an airline based in Chicago, Illinois, United States. It is wholly owned by the Nasdaq-listed United Airlines Holdings, Inc. and is a member of Star Alliance. One of its founding carriers, Varney Air Lines, made its first flight in 1926, and the company merged with Continental Airlines in 2010.Open the full entry Flight 93, carrying 44 passengers and crew, was hijacked by four al-Qaeda terrorists and crashed into a farm field near Shanksville, Somerset County, killing everyone aboard. Sixty-four Pennsylvanians were among the roughly 2,752 people killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. On October 5, 2001, Governor Tom Ridge resigned to become the nation’s first Director of the Office of Homeland Security.⁠[7]

The Marcellus Shale lies 2,000 to 6,000 feet underground beneath nearly all of Pennsylvania except the southeastern quarter and is extracted by combining horizontal drilling with hydraulic fracturing. By 2010, 600 wells had been drilled, and 6,498 more were added between December 31, 2010, and June 1, 2013, with the most in Warren (703), Bradford (625) and Lycoming (584) counties; concerns include hazards to water supplies. In 2010 Pennsylvania’s mines recorded no fatalities for the first time in the state’s mining history.⁠[7]

In the apportionment following the 2020 census, Pennsylvania’s seats in the U.S. House of Representatives fell from 18 to 17, with an average of 765,403 people per seat. Pennsylvania has 19 electoral votes in the 2024 and 2028 presidential elections.⁠[8][9]

The current state constitution dates from 1968. The legislature, the General Assembly, consists of a 50-member Senate elected to four-year terms and a 203-member House of Representatives elected to two-year terms. The governor serves a four-year term and may be reelected to one additional term.⁠[10]

As of November 2026 the governor is Josh ShapiroJosh ShapiroJosh Shapiro is an American Democratic politician and lawyer who has been the 48th governor of Pennsylvania since January 2023. He previously served as a Pennsylvania state representative, chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners and state attorney general, and was re-elected governor in November 2026.Open the full entry, sworn in in January 2023 as Pennsylvania’s 48th governor; he previously served as attorney general (2017–2023), chair of the Montgomery County Board of Commissioners (2011–2017) and state representative (2005–2011).⁠[11]

The Supreme Court has seven justices elected to 10-year terms. The General Assembly classifies municipalities by population: Philadelphia is the state’s only first-class city, and Pittsburgh and Scranton are second-class cities; a 1968 amendment allowed municipalities to adopt home rule. The Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, created in 1945, is the official history agency of the Commonwealth, collecting, conserving and interpreting its historic heritage.⁠[10][12]

Pennsylvania is bounded on the north by Lake Erie and New York State, on the east by New York State and New JerseyNew JerseyNew Jersey is a state in the eastern United States on the Atlantic Ocean, bordered by New York State, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, with the Hudson River forming its northeastern boundary and the Delaware River its western boundary; its capital is Trenton and its largest city is Newark. One of the original 13 colonies, it became the third state to ratify the U.S. Constitution on December 18, 1787, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 9,288,994.Open the full entry, on the south by Delaware, Maryland and West VirginiaWest VirginiaWest Virginia is a U.S. state formed from the western counties of Virginia during the Civil War; its capital and largest city is Charleston. It became the 35th state on June 20, 1863. Its population was 1,793,716 in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020).Open the full entry, and on the west by West Virginia and OhioOhioOhio is a state in the Midwestern United States; its capital is Columbus. It joined the Union in 1803 as the 17th state, the first carved from the Northwest Territory, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 11,799,448.Open the full entry; it has no Atlantic coastline, only a 40-mile (65-km) Lake Erie waterfront.⁠[13]

By U.S. Census Bureau measurements based on state boundaries as of January 1, 2010, Pennsylvania has a total area of 46,054 square miles (119,280 km²), of which 44,743 square miles (115,883 km²) is land and 1,312 square miles (3,397 km²) is water, including 748 square miles (1,938 km²) of Great Lakes water. The highest point is Mount Davis in Somerset County, at 3,213 feet (979 m); the lowest is the Delaware River in Delaware County, at sea level.⁠[14][15][13]

The state includes parts of large physiographic regions of the Appalachian system: the Ridge and Valley Province, with long, narrow valleys and parallel ridges, and to its west and north the Appalachian Plateau, divided from it by the Allegheny Front. In the east the Delaware River is fed mainly by the Lehigh and Schuylkill rivers; the Susquehanna drains the largest section of the state; and the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers meet at Pittsburgh to form the Ohio, which flows west to the MississippiMississippiMississippi is a state of the United States on the Gulf of Mexico; Jackson is both its capital and its largest city. It was admitted to the Union on December 10, 1817, as the 20th state, and its population in the 2020 census (April 1, 2020) was 2,961,279.Open the full entry. Pennsylvania generally has a humid continental climate, with July averaging about 70 °F (21 °C) and January about 28 °F (−2 °C).⁠[13]

U.S. Census Bureau Vintage 2025 estimates put Pennsylvania’s population at 13,059,432 on July 1, 2025, up 0.4% from the April 1, 2020, estimates base of 13,002,753 and fifth among the states; population density in 2020 was 290.6 people per square mile. In 2020–2024, 7.7% of residents were foreign-born.⁠[16][17]

The 2000 census counted 12,281,071 people and the 2010 census 12,702,379, an increase of 3.4 percent; in 2010 women outnumbered men by 330,261 (51.3 percent), and the median age rose from 38 in 2000 to 40.1 in 2010. About 80 percent of population growth comes from international immigration.⁠[7]

Bureau of Economic Analysis data put Pennsylvania’s nominal GDP at $1.0565 trillion ($1,056,488.2 million) in 2025 and $1.0091 trillion ($1,009,145.1 million) in 2024.⁠[18]

The state’s economy diversified as coal, steel and railroads declined. In 2008 Pennsylvania produced 6,394,845 net tons of raw steel and it is a national leader in specialty steel; in 2009 it was the fourth-largest bituminous coal producer, with 60,030,294 tons; and its natural gas producers operate more than 55,000 wells. At the turn of the 21st century health services employed about one-tenth of the workforce. Pennsylvania is not a right-to-work state.⁠[7][10]

Median household income for 2020–2024 was $77,971 (in 2024 dollars), and the state had 307,065 employer establishments in 2023.⁠[16]

Pennsylvania has more than 100 four-year colleges and universities. The University of Pittsburgh, founded in 1787, is state-supported; Pennsylvania State University, founded in 1855, is the state’s land-grant institution, based at University Park; and Temple University in Philadelphia, founded in 1884, is also state-supported. In 2020–2024, 35.2% of residents aged 25 and over held a bachelor’s degree or higher.⁠[10][16]

School districts were consolidated from more than 2,000 to 742 by 1968 and now number 500; the public system also includes 175 charter schools, 86 career and technology centers and 29 intermediate units, and 1,757,678 students were enrolled in public schools in 2012–2013.⁠[7]

Pennsylvania’s nickname is the “Keystone State”: a keystone is the central stone that holds an arch together, and the state tourism office describes Pennsylvania as having played that role in holding the early Union together; its central location on the Eastern Seaboard is also sometimes said to be the source of the nickname. The state motto is “Virtue, Liberty, and Independence.”⁠[19][13]

The state flag was authorized by the General Assembly in 1799 and standardized in 1907; the state seal was authorized in 1791, and the coat of arms is based on a 1778 design. The state bird is the ruffed grouse (June 22, 1931), the state tree the hemlock (June 23, 1931), the state flower the mountain laurel (May 5, 1933), the state animal the whitetail deer (October 2, 1959), the state dog the Great Dane (August 15, 1965), the state fish the brook trout (March 9, 1970), the state insect the firefly (April 10, 1974), the state beverage milk (April 29, 1982) and the state song “Pennsylvania” (November 29, 1990).⁠[19]

Commonwealth of Pennsylvania: Official website: https://www.pa.gov/ (opens in a new window).⁠[4]

Governor Josh Shapiro: Official website: https://www.pa.gov/governor/about/governor-josh-shapiro.html (opens in a new window).⁠[11]

Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission: Official website: https://www.pa.gov/agencies/phmc/about-phmc.html (opens in a new window).⁠[12]