When most people think of Pennsylvania, images of dirty steelworkers and factories belching smoke into the sky come to mind. And rightly so, in the US Pennsylvania dominated the steel, coal and railroad industries during the 19th Century.
Pennsylvania is so identified with this blue collar heritage that a statue of a steelworker was placed on the grounds of the Governor's Mansion in the state capital of Harrisburg.
However, by the 1960s only the steel industry remained of the state's proud industrial heritage, and the economic downturn of the 1970s destroyed even that remaining industry, which resulted in massive unemployment and empty factories in the state's industrial centres of Pittsburgh and the north east.
The first white settlers to Pennsylvania were farmers and while the 20th Century saw a decline in the overall acreage of land under the plough, improvements in farming methods soon made agriculture the leading industry in the Keystone State [Keystone State is one of Pennsylvania's nicknames which is derived from its key role in the Revolutionary War. It was considered to be the keystone and if it fell, the entire rebellion would have fallen. ] .
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