Zachariah Connell, the founder of the town of Connellsville, came here a few years later than the settlement of William McCormick, whose brother-in-law he was, having married Mrs. McCormick’s sister, Ann Crawford. He came to this section of country soon after 1770, and stopped at the house of his future father-in-law, Capt. (afterwards Colonel) William Crawford. After his marriage, which was probably in 1773, he lived for some time on the west side of the river, but afterwards, at a time which cannot be exactly fixed (between 1773 and 1778), moved to the east side of the stream and located on a tract of land which was designated in his warrant of survey as “Mud Island,” which included the present site of the borough of Connellsville. He built his log cabin facing the river, on or very near the spot where the Trans-Allegheny House now stands, on Water Street. There he lived for many years, until he removed to the stone house which he had built at the corner of Grave Street and Hill Alley. After the death of his wife, Ann Crawford, he married a Miss Wallace, a sister of “Aunt Jenny” Wallace, who was long and well known in later years as the keeper of the toll-bridge across the Youghiogheny River. The later years of Mr. Connell’s life were devoted to the care of his real estate. He became an ardent Methodist, and donated the lot on which the church of that denomination was built. He died in his stone house on Grave Street, Aug. 26, 1813, aged seventy-two years, and was buried near the residence of John Freeman, where his remains still rest near those of his two wives, and where a broken slab marks the last resting-place of the founder of Connellsville. By his first wife Mr. Connell was the father of four children, of whom two were sons,—Hiram and John. The former lived and died in Connellsville, the latter removed to the West. Of the two daughters, one married William Page, who became a Methodist preacher, and removed with his wife to Adams County, Ohio, about 1810. The other married Greensbury Jones, an exhorter, and emigrated with him to the West. The second wife of Mr. Connell became the mother of two daughters, who respectively became the wives of Joseph and Wesley Phillips, sons of John Phillips, of Uniontown.
