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Scottdale is a borough in Westmoreland County, about 32 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

Scottdale was founded in 1872, when brothers Peter and Jacob Loucks — local farmers who foresaw the impact of two new railroad lines — laid out a townsite of just 24 lots that first went on sale that fall.

The community was originally called Fountain Mills, after its distillery, flour mill and post office, but when it incorporated as a borough on February 5, 1874 it was renamed for Thomas A. Scott, president of the Pennsylvania Railroad and a former Civil War Assistant Secretary of War.

In the early 1900s Scottdale was the center of the Frick coke interests: the H. C. Frick Coke Company was headquartered here, and some 30,000 coke ovens operated in the surrounding area.

Scottdale's early factories produced steel and iron pipe, brass and silver ware, caskets and machine-shop products — all now defunct, with Duraloy Technologies, the first company in the United States to create heat-resistant alloys, the last remnant of its steel-era prosperity.

Scottdale's population peaked at 6,493 in 1940 and had fallen to 4,430 by the 2020 census, living in 1,933 households.

West Overton Village in Scottdale is the only pre-Civil War village still intact in Pennsylvania, preserved as a museum of a 19th-century rural industrial village and a stop on the American Whiskey Trail.

Scottdale has two sites on the National Register of Historic Places — the Scottdale Armory, built in 1929, and the Scottdale Historic District — and its oldest surviving building, the Jacob Loucks House, dates to 1853.

Scottdale's Geyer Performing Arts Center opened in 1900 as an opera house; as The Strand it was one of the first theaters equipped to show films with sound, and it reopened in 1987 as a live stage theater.

The Coal and Coke Trail runs 5.5 miles from Scottdale to Mount Pleasant along the former Pennsylvania Railroad route once used to ship coal and coke out of the borough.