Crime Scene and Trauma Cleanup in Frenchville, PA

Frenchville is an unincorporated community and census-designated place in Covington Township, Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, known in French as Ville Française.

The community lies along Pennsylvania Route 879, about 12.7 miles east-northeast of Clearfield, the county seat.

Frenchville was founded in 1835 when families recruited in France were brought to settle land in the Pennsylvania wilderness, and about 40 French families had emigrated there within five years.

The village was named for the French ancestry of its first settlers, who came to farm and log the surrounding forest.

Frenchville gave its name to Frenchville French, a unique dialect of the French language that developed in isolation in the community and was spoken there into the 1960s; linguists later documented it as moribund, with only two native speakers reported in 2007.

Frenchville's post office, ZIP code 16836, opened on February 18, 1839, only a few years after the settlement began.

Clearfield County's first recorded white burial took place in the Frenchville area in 1771, when a French seaman named Tohas Auxe died while traveling from Canada to New Orleans; his gravestone was rediscovered on a local farm in 1896.

The annual Frenchville Picnic has been held at St. Mary's Catholic Church since the 1870s, making it one of the community's longest-running traditions.

The Census Bureau only defined Frenchville as a census-designated place in 2023, so it has no decennial census count of its own; recent Census Bureau survey estimates put the community at roughly 160 residents, while surrounding Covington Township counted 621 residents in 2000, 182 of them of French descent.