Hermitage, the youngest city in Mercer County, has township roots that stretch back to the early-1800s.

Hermitage was chartered as Hickory Township in 1832 when the county's original six townships were subdivided. Hickory Township was formed on 39 square miles that had belonged to Shenango and Pymatuning townships.

The township was named after the seventh president of the United States, Andrew Jackson of Tennessee, whose nickname was "Old Hickory."

The area that would become Hickory Township was settled in the second half of the 1790s.

Thomas Cannon and John J. Moore settled there in 1796 and Henry Hoagland began farming in the Patagonia area as early as 1798.

Hoagland and his neighbor, Daniel Hull, opened the area's first school on North Water Avenue in 1800, according to Mairy Jayn Woge of the Hermitage Historical Society. The school would stay open until the beginning of World War II. Mrs. Woge said the area had 18 taxpayers by 1800.

Until Hickory Township formed in 1832 and for the first three years of its existence, the township was primarily a farming community. But the discovery of coal on Issac Patterson's West Hill property in 1835 turned Hickory Township into a mining community.

At the time Hickory Township was the Shenango Valley. The valley's second-oldest community, Sharon, became a borough in 1841.

Shortly after the coal discovery, Joel Curtis, a Mercer stagecoach salesman, bought Patterson's land for $2,000 and opened a coal mine there, Mrs. Woge said. "It was the birth of industry in the area. Hickory Township became a prosperous coal community," Mrs. Woge said. "There was a lot of coal and a lot of miners."

By 1840 the township's population had soared to 1,841. Mrs. Woge said the township's "coal boom" was during the 1870s and 1880s; the population soared as high as 7,700. The coal industry died by 1920, Mrs. Woge said, and it would be about three decades until the township experienced another boom.

The township became the second-most populated community in the county in 1960. It had 12,635 people. "The space was in the township. The soldiers came home and got married. There wasn't room in the cities to build houses," Mrs. Woge said.

In 1955 Hickory Township became a first-class township, Mrs. Woge said, a move that ended further annexation. Annexations had reduced the size of the township to about 29 square miles.

Sharon annexed township land to form a borough in 1841 and the other valley communities would take township land as they formed and grew in ensuing years. Because the township was an independent community, the surrounding cities and boroughs could easily take land.