Emergency Crime Scene and Biohazard Cleanup in Stoneboro, PA

Stoneboro is a borough in eastern Mercer County, built on the south shore of Sandy Lake, and it is part of the Hermitage micropolitan area.

Sandy Lake, the borough's centerpiece, is a glacial lake left behind by the last Ice Age, and it has drawn settlers and recreation to the site for two centuries.

Stoneboro began around 1825 as a settlement of Black freedmen seeking a home in a free state, and for years the lakeside community was known as 'Liberia,' a name it kept until around the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.

In 1818 a Black freeman named Richard Travis paid two dollars for 150 acres along Sandy Lake, on land that had been granted to Revolutionary War veterans in 1794, and a Commonwealth historic marker along State Route 62 today identifies the cemetery of that early Liberia settlement.

The borough is named for Amasa Stone, president of both the Mercer Iron & Coal Company and the local railroad, and Stoneboro was incorporated on August 25, 1866, after the coal company and 103 residents petitioned for borough status.

Stoneboro grew up as a coal town: the Mercer Iron & Coal Company's No. 2 Mine alone produced 66,536 tons of coal with 125 miners in 1887, but the company's big mines shut down abruptly in 1924 and the local coal era faded out by the 1970s.

In 1903 Stoneboro built a gravity-fed water works that needed no pumping station — spring water flows a mile and a half downhill into a reservoir — a system the county history said no other Mercer County borough had.

Stoneboro's population peaked at 1,405 in 1920 during the coal era and has since eased down to 946 residents at the 2020 census.

The Lakeview School District is headquartered on Mercer Street in Stoneboro, and its Lakeview High School and Oakview Elementary School serve the borough and about 146 square miles of rural Mercer County.