Photo from History of Warren County Judge Nathaniel B. Eldred, the namesake for Eldred Township in western Warren County. He was a president judge of the judicial district that included Warren from 1835 to 1839.

Eldred Township is largely rural now.

It was even more rural when it was founded.

When the township was created in September 1843, the total number of voters? 13.

Schenck’s History of Warren County details that the township was named for Nathaniel B. Eldred.

Born in 1795 and educated in common schools in Wayne County, Schenck writes that Eldred “was favored with no advantages except those bestowed by nature.”

Those, however, were enough for him to quickly advance in the early Pennsylvania legal community, serving in the legislature, a presidential elector for James K. Polk in 1844 and was recommended for a position on the state Supreme Court, a position he ultimately turned down to remain at his home.

“His mental constitution was a rare combination of sturdy personal qualities, quick intelligence, keen powers of observation, generous impulses, rigid integrity and a ready adaptability to surrounding conditions,” Schenck wrote.

His connection to Warren was an appointment as the county’s president judge when the county was part of a multi-county judicial district.

He was judge of that district from 1835 to 1839.

“As an advocate Judge Eldred was clear in argument, earnest and persuasive, resisting on the broad basis of equity,” Schenck wrote.

According to Findagrave, Eldred died in 1867 and is buried in Wayne County.

While the township bears his name, the work of creating the township “belongs justly to Samuel W.B. sanford, who drew up, circulated and pushed through the petition upon which the order of the court was based,” Schenck wrote.

He describes the township as “quite regular in outline, being nearly a square in form” and “well adapted for agriculture, especially grazing.”

“Eldred, like all the townships in Northwestern Pennsylvania which do not border on some important water way, was left uninhabited by man many years after the river lands had become quite thickly populated.”

Unsurprisingly, lumber was the chief industry in the early years and that industry ultimately cleared the way – literally – for agricultural pursuits to take root.

Schenck records that the first settler was Lovell Greeley, an uncle of Horace Greeley, a mid-19th century editor of one of the nation’s most prominent newspapers, the New-York Tribune, which was a significant voice in national politics during the Civil War.

The first store would open during the war – 1862 – while the first tavern opened “a few years before the war,” per Schenck.

The only real populated area in the township is Grand Valley, which was brought into existence largely by the expansion of the Dunkirk, Allegheny Valley and Pittsburgh Railroad.

The first school in the township dates to 1840 and there were eight schools in the township in the 1880s. Nearly 200 students attended the school in Grand Valley in the 1880s.