Historic Hanna's Town: A gem by candlelight

Amber and Kevin Larson of Greensburg were making their first visit Thursday night to Historic Hanna’s Town, the recreated colonial village about six miles north of Greensburg.

“It’s really cute. I want to come back and see more of it,” said Amber Larson, who recently moved to Westmoreland County from Erie County. “It seems it would be a nice place to have a family picnic.”

They were among the visitors to Hanna’s Town in Hempfield, during Thursday’s Candlelight Open House. They and dozens others toured Robert Hanna’s Tavern and the reconstructed two-story log house that replicates the spacious home of a colonial family on the frontier of the late 1700s.

The candlelight open house is a casual event that allows people to see the historic recreated village literally in a different light. The darkened rooms were lit only by candles and dimmed artificial light. The only warmth against the chilly night air was the heat from logs burning in the fireplace.

The Westmoreland Historical Society, which operates Hanna’s Town at the county-owned site, has held the candlelight open house in previous years, but had to cancel it last year because of covid restrictions, said Lisa C. Hays, Historical Society executive director.

Hays, dressed as a colonial housewife with her long dress and white bonnet, offered visitors some historical perspective on the ground where they were walking.

Robert Hanna founded the village in 1773 and the site became the first court in what later would become Western Pennsylvania.

Although the surrender of British Gen. Cornwallis at Yorktown, Va. was supposed to end hostilities in the American Revolution, Native Americans and their British allies raided the village in July 1782 in order to drive the settlers away. The villagers fled to the inside of a stockade, but the buildings in the village were destroyed by fire and the town never recovered, Hays said.

The county seat was moved to Greensburg.

“We’re an archaeological treasure,” Hays said, sitting inside a log house that had been moved more than a year ago from the Oakford Park section of Penn Township.

At Hanna’s Tavern, Robert Hanna meted out frontier justice in his role as a judge. He also profited from those who needed food and drink during the court days that occurred four times a year, said Michael Cary of Latrobe, chairman of the Historical Society board.

His wife, Eloise Cary of Latrobe, was inside the tavern, dressed in the colonial garb of a working woman. It is an outfit that Cary said she sewed mostly by hand.

“I wanted to experience what it was like” to sew the clothing by hand, Cary said.