Lou Phillips was born and raised in Leechburg.
He attended Leechburg Area High School, where he played baseball, basketball and football. He sang in the chorus, dabbled as a thespian in the school’s theater program and participated in countless clubs the school had to offer.
“You get to try everything in a small school because they grab you,” Phillips said. “They make you come and participate. That’s the advantage.”
In 2019, Phillips founded the Leechburg Area Community Development Corp., a nonprofit focused on creating events and bringing amenities to Leechburg, West Leechburg, Hyde Park and Gilpin. These projects coincide with the corporation’s mission to help build up Leechburg and find the town’s modern identity.
Phillips, 82, is among those who are focused on improving Leechburg and its surrounding communities.
“What do we learn from the history of Leechburg? You have no idea where the town’s going,” Phillips said. “What is this town going to be in the future? It was transportation. It was farming. It was coal mines, steel mills, and now it’s not.”
A brief history
Leechburg, consisting of a land grant of 192 acres, has gone by a few different names over the years.
According to the community develepment corporation, the area was first patented in 1783 by White Mattock, a Native American chief.
After the Revolutionary War, the area, first known as Friendship and subsequently as White Plains, became a farming community as British and German settlers established themselves in the area.
It remained a farming community until 1827, when David Leech — for whom the town was later named — arrived and began building a dam on the Kiski River as part of the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal, connecting Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.
Leechburg was a canal town. The canal from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh ran through Leechburg. It was a shipping town in the mid-1800s and, when the railroads came in, it continued to be a shipping town.
Since then, the town has experienced multiple evolutions, seemingly fitting whatever business was booming at the time. After housing railroads, steel mills and mining centers, the borough, officially incorporated as Leechburg in 1850, recently celebrated its 175-year anniversary as an incorporated municipality.
Throughout the country’s different eras, Leechburg changed along with it. Over the years, the small town became a hub for railroad shipment, coal mines and steel mills.
Today, the town doesn’t necessarily have an identity. But it has a lot of people rooting for it.
Groups and individuals who grew up in town and came back, or some who never left, are putting Leechburg’s best foot forward to help the borough settle into its modern identity.
Emphasizing community
The borough’s mayor, Doreen Smeal, was elected in 2024 after serving a short stint on council.
“I raised my family here and wanted to give back, inspired by my late friend Wayne Dobos, a supportive mayor who encouraged community ideas,” Smeal said. “After his passing, I aimed to continue his efforts to improve the town.”
Born and raised in Leechburg, Smeal said the small-town feel of the borough helps maintain community connections. According to data from the 2020 census, the borough is home to 2,149 people, a slow decline from the two previous census populations.
“Despite everything, this close-knit community genuinely cares. Here, when we say ‘hello’ or ‘see you soon,’ we mean it,” Smeal said.
Smeal and Phillips have a similar approach to town revitalization. It’s all about community.
“Residents have to be talking to each other,” Phillips said. “Residents have to know each other.”
Phillips made lifelong friendships while growing up in the small town.
Phillips, with the development corporation, has worked on projects including fixing up the gazebo in Leechburg’s Riverfront Park, creating a community office space in the building that was previously First Commonwealth Bank and fixing up the high dive at the Leechburg Area Pool.
Another completed project is the Leechburg Tow Path Trail that serves as a passageway to almost 600 miles of trail along the Allegheny and Kiski rivers. The next project the development corporation has its sights set on is fixing up the Hyde Park footbridge.
These projects, Phillips said, are a way to encourage residents and visitors to spend time out in the community.
“It’s about helping the town evolve,” Phillips said.
In her role as mayor, Smeal worked with the Leechburg Area Community Association to create Mingle on Market, a monthly communitywide event featuring sidewalk sales, food and music in Leechburg’s business district. She also led the planning of the borough’s weeklong 250th-anniversary celebration.
“I’d like to shift the town’s mindset from steel to tourism,” Smeal said.
The residential side
Leechburg Area graduates John Wagner, 24, Chace Wadsworth, 23, and Nico Venanzio, 25, grew up in Leechburg and Gilpin. The three of them started a real estate company called Peak Properties.
The company is focused on creating affordable housing opportunities for potential residents by fixing up dilapidated properties in the Georgetown neighborhood of Gilpin and Leechburg and putting them back on the market as rental properties.
“We really like the idea of having nicer houses and making the community — not that Georgetown is bad — but taking the community and making it better,” Wadsworth said.
Wagner said he takes pride in Peak Properties’ work because he knows the company is offering people good options for living spaces.
“We’d really like to reinvest here because this is where we grew up and especially where I grew up,” Wagner said. “My whole childhood was in Georgetown. I lived in the houses we’re fixing up now.”
After graduating from Leechburg High School in 1961, Phillips pursued higher education. He now lives in Upper St. Clair.
Never forgetting his roots, though, Phillips purchased some property in the borough along the Kiski River about 25 years ago. He and his family spend time on the river, and he gets to visit with friends he grew up with.
“It’s been wonderful,” Phillips said.
The development corporation might also be dipping its toe into the real estate market, Phillips said.
“All of these small communities have got housing that is abandoned and run down,” he said.
In some cases, nonprofits are able to take over abandoned or blighted properties. Phillips said the organization is looking into fixing up those properties.
Love for Leechburg Area
Andrew Pallus, 24, has been a member of the Leechburg Area School Board since 2024.
Another borough native, Pallus graduated from the high school in 2020. He’s a student at Duquesne University Pharmacy School and works as a pharmacy intern at Vandergrift Pharmacy.
“Growing up, I would always be in class sizes of less than 25 people. This allowed for a personal, individualized approach to teaching and learning,” Pallus said. “When you have a class size that small, it allowed your teachers to get to know you, your family and help tailor your educational needs to what might be best for you.”
Pallus said he wants to make a point to give back to those who have always supported him, which led him to get involved with the school board and the borough’s parks and recreation committee.
“I have so many hopes for being on the school board — some more attainable than others,” Pallus said. “I hope for everyone to have an impactful school that I did when I attended school at Leechburg. I hope to be as transparent as I am able to and generally just give back to the district that, you can say, raised me.”
Pallus has his sights set on helping develop the district’s science department.
“One of the unfortunates of going to a small school, we did not always have the same opportunities as larger schools,” Pallus said. “For instance, I never took organic chemistry or was even exposed to it in high school.”
As for his work on the parks and rec board, he hopes to create a small outdoor recreational space available to the community near the school’s football field.
He described growing up in Leechburg as “interconnected.”
“My maternal family roots are traced back to Gilpin and West Leechburg so, naturally, if my family knew someone, from a young age, I was always introduced to them and began to become connected in some way or another,” Pallus said. “Growing up in a small town, you recognize everyone. When you go to the store, to a parade or community event, you are bound to run into someone you know.”
Pallus said his major hope for Leechburg is for the town to continue to be successful.
“We have a golden opportunity to put Leechburg back on the map and grow our community, but we have to do it by working together,” Pallus said. “When we all work together for the common good of our community, we can grow and flourish for years to come.”