Swissvale, Pennsylvania
borough in Pennsylvania
Swissvale is a borough in Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States, 9 miles (14 km) east of downtown Pittsburgh. Named for a farmstead owned by James Swisshelm, during the industrial age it was the site of the Union Switch and Signal Company of George Westinghouse. The population was 8,624 at the 2020 census.
History
Swissvale is named after the Swisshelm family. John Swisshelm (1752–1838), who owned a farm where the town is located. John Swisshelm served under General George Washington in the Revolutionary War, and camped at Valley Forge. Swisshelm married Mary Elizabeth Miller, and they had many children. Their son, James Swisshelm, married Jane Grey Cannon, noted abolitionist and political activist, Jane Swisshelm named the town Swissvale as the town overlooked the Monongahela River Valley. The Pittsburgh neighborhood of Swisshelm Park, adjacent to Swissvale, is named after John Swisshelm.
Since 1874, the Allegheny Car & Transportation Shops had provided well-paying jobs to local citizens and were later purchased by George Westinghouse, the President of Westinghouse Air Brake Company, who formed the Union Switch & Signal company and maintained that facility in Swissvale.
“Swissvale, Pennsylvania” enters the record as borough in Pennsylvania. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Swissvale, Pennsylvania and borough can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1180427. VIAF identifies the subject as 143135822. The Library of Congress control number is n85189239. Authority coordinates are 40.422, -79.886. 4 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2020, 1752, 1838 and 1874.
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This entry incorporates text from “Swissvale, Pennsylvania” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.