Cranberry Twp Real Estate

Cranberry Township is a municipality in Butler County, Pennsylvania. The population was 33,096 as of the 2020 census. Cranberry Township is one of the fastest-growing areas of the Pittsburgh metropolitan area.

Demographics

As of July 2015, the U.S. Census estimated the township's population at 30,458 in 10,769 households. The population density was 1,231.1 people per square mile (400.2/km2). The racial makeup of the township was 94.4% White, 1.2% African American, 2.8% Asian, and 1.1% from two or more races. Cranberry is a family-oriented community. As of 2012, 71.98% of Cranberry's male population 15 and older was married; the corresponding figure for females was 69.45%. The national rates were 53.97% and 51.02%, respectively. 44.5% of the township's households had children under 18 living with them and household size averaged 3.22. The median population age as of 2016 was 35.96. The median income for a household in the township in 2019 was $106,024. Approximately 2.5% of families were below the poverty line.

History

In 1753, George Washington, then 21, was working for the Virginia Colony's British governor and hiked through what is now Cranberry Township along the Venango Path. His assignment was to deliver a message to the commander of the rival French Fort LeBoeuf that ordered the French to withdraw from northern Pennsylvania. The commander rejected the order, precipitating the French and Indian War, which the British and their colonies ultimately won but at a great cost.
When the township was originally chartered in 1804, it had a substantially larger area than it has now. In 1854, its boundaries were redrawn, reducing Cranberry from 81 to 25 square miles.[7]Although the Iroquois, the Delaware, and Seneca nations had hunted and fished in the Cranberry area for centuries, the first European settlers, Mathew and William Graham, arrived in 1796. There, the brothers both acquired 200 acres of land that Benjamin Franklin had designated as part of the nation's Depreciation Land program, used to pay Revolutionary War soldiers with land, which was abundant, rather than in cash, which was scarce.
Over the following decades, the Graham family and Samuel Duncan, another early settler, opened a tavern, a distillery, a sawmill, and a grist mill. In 1806, Graham began the community's first church, the Plains Church, now the Plains United Presbyterian Church, which remains an active congregation. Descendants of the Graham family continue to reside in the community, which is sometimes confused with the homonymous Cranberry Township in Venango County (formerly Fairfield Township, founded 1806), a much smaller community 60 mi (97 km) away. Prior to World War II, Cranberry Township was primarily an agricultural community, without a traditional downtown. Although small stores, taverns, mills and implement-making shops had operated in Cranberry for years, its development did not really accelerate until the Pennsylvania Turnpike's western section was completed in 1951, with an exit at Route 19, Cranberry's main arterial road, followed by the 1966 opening of I -79, which crossed the Turnpike at the township's southern end. With support and encouragement from the nonprofit Cranberry Industrial Development Corporation, formed by the township's board of supervisors in the mid-1960s, a local industrial park was created and quickly filled. It was soon followed by other business and light industrial park facilities catering to companies seeking inexpensive land with easy highway access.[Reflections of Cranberry Township. Helen Goehring Dewald. Cranberry Township Historical Society. 2005]. The 1989 opening of I-279 further accelerated the township's growth, shortening the drive time to Downtown Pittsburgh to less than half an hour.
The township's name derives from the wild cranberries that were abundant along the banks of Brush Creek prior to the 20th century. For centuries, the cranberries had attracted deer, which, in turn, attracted Native American hunters. However, drought and farming combined to eliminate the township's namesake fruit by the 1880s.
Today's Cranberry Township also contains several smaller, unincorporated census-designated places including Ogle, Fernway, and Fox Run, neighborhoods whose names continue to appear on some online maps. The Cranberry Township Historical Society, formed in 1984, was created to collect and preserve relics of the community's early local history; a permanent display of early artifacts is currently under construction in the township's Municipal Center.

Geography

Cranberry Township is located in western Pennsylvania (40.70996 N, 80.10605 W). Although it is often described as a residential suburb of Pittsburgh, less than a 30-minute drive to its downtown, Cranberry is also a regional, economic, and employment center in its own right. The number of people commuting into the township to participate in its 20,500-member workforce is considerably larger than the 9,200 township residents who commute to work outside Cranberry. According to the United States Census Bureau, the township has a total area of 22.8 square miles (59.1 km2), 0.004 sq mi (0.01 km2), or 0.02%, of which is water.

Information provided by https://en.wikipedia.org/