In the early 1800s, ancient forests stretched unbroken across northwestern Pennsylvania. Jacob Ridgway of Philadelphia, one of the richest men in the United States, saw opportunity in the region's massive trees and clear-flowing rivers and purchased 100,000 acres of this land, newly deeded to the U.S. government by the Six Nations Indian tribes. In 1822, his land agent, James Gillis, founded Ridgway at the Montmorency Farm Site six and one-half miles from the present town site. Because Montmorency lacked adequate streams to operate mills and float goods to market, Gillis shifted the town of Ridgway to this river valley. When Elk County was established in 1843, towns vied for the honor of becoming the county seat. Ridgway prevailed and, in 1845, constructed a wooden courthouse on this site. By 1879, Elk County had outgrown the wooden courthouse and sold it at public auction to Hugh McGeehan for $135. A few months later, the cornerstone of the new courthouse was laid with great ceremony, and town fathers placed within it a copper box containing period newspapers, coins, and a poem commemorating the day. In 1880, the courthouse was completed, built of native sandstone and brick and roofed with tin and slate, and the original half-ton steel bell still hangs in the bell tower. Not everyone accepted Ridgway as county seat: in 1849, townspeople in St. Marys, eleven miles east of Ridgway, petitioned to move the county seat to their town, but state legislators dismissed their appeal and Ridgway remained the center of Elk County government. After buying the original courthouse, Hugh McGeehan moved it down Main Street and incorporated it into the Bogert House, a new hotel he and P. F. Bogert were constructing. In 1905, at the peak of Ridgway's prosperity, McGeehan replaced the original boarding house with a four-story, 76-room hotel and again attached the courthouse, with the hotel's 150-seat dining room occupying the former courtroom. Fire destroyed the original courthouse building in 1990.