Municipalities in Indiana County, Pennsylvania - Indiana, Pennsylvania (Paperback)

Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. Pages: 134. Not illustrated. Chapters: Indiana, Pennsylvania. Excerpt: Indiana, Pennsylvania - For decades the major industry of the town was coal mining, but as mines closed throughout the latter half of the twentieth century the area has had ongoing economic difficulty. Natural gas surveying and production have picked up some of the slack, and Indiana serves as the home of the largest privately owned drilling company in the United States, S.W. Jack Drilling Company. It also counts a number of other production and service firms as members of the community, as well as three publicly traded companies: S&T Bancorp, Inc., First Commonwealth Financial Corp., and Superior Well Services Inc.- unique considering the size of the community. In addition it holds one of the nation's largest independent insurance agencies: The Reschini Group - which was started by the nation's first female insurance agent Rose Reschini in 1938. A large section of the southern part of the town, and bordering the university is occupied by Kovalchick Salvage Co. The land was recently purchased by the university and it plans to rejuvenate part of what is considered the largest eyesore in the community. Kovalchick holds large amounts of railroad salvage and aluminum. As of December 2008, roughly fifty percent of the salvage materials held by Kovalchick Corporation have been cleared or otherwise removed from publicly viewable land. Arguably the most celebrated and notorious environmentalist author of the twentieth century, Edward Abbey (19271989), was born at the Indiana hospital and raised in Indiana and near the Indiana County towns and villages of Saltsburg, Pennsylvania, Tanoma, and Home, Pennsylvania. Abbey's first novel, Jonathan Troy (1954), is set entirely in a thinly disguised Indiana, and his novel The Fool's Progress (1988), which he called his "fat masterpie...