Some of Connellsville’s strongest assets are not only its physical infrastructure, but its social infrastructure. Connellsville does have beautiful buildings, new bike infrastructure, and access to outdoor adventure spaces. Yet it’s the people who make the place what it is and are the strongest source of potential for growth. At the town’s Canteen, we spoke with a number of local stakeholders who not only had a great deal of familiarity with the needs of the town, but knew the community itself inside and out. What started as a group of tables filled with random people became a network of visionaries, artists, and teachers, united around the value of showing up for each other. They took time out of their day to support the cultural trust’s programming and even took the time to talk with us, students they hadn’t even met. Yet they were excited to work with us and help us grow our projects. There was an assumption of friendship by simply being in Connellsville. 

The Canteen is also an asset within itself. It’s a prominent third place, meaning a gathering space outside the home, work, and school. It’s a place where people from across town can come to eat, spend time together, and learn about the rich local history in the area. Inside the Canteen was this vast model train exhibit of an earlier Connellsville, highlighting the railyard, the agriculture, the logging, and the rich history that shaped the town we saw in 2025. Every detail was so carefully crafted, it was like stepping into a time machine. This train exhibit might feature a relic of the past, but the dedication to preservation and honoring Connellsville’s roots signify great promise for the future. It displays the asset of emphasis on keeping tradition alive, even as the world modernizes and the town evolves.

I knew going into this visit that Connellsville had a strong foundation of arts and culture, largely thanks to the work of the Fayette County Cultural Trust. I also knew arts were a valuable asset of a number of small towns across the Appalachian region, with many community members valuing opportunities for a creative outlet. Yet I simply didn’t recognize the scope of the Connellsville arts scene until I saw it for myself. When I spoke to Michael from the cultural trust at the Canteen, I asked if he knew of any arts organizations that could help us with an arts-based project we had been brainstorming. I just so happened to be in luck. He directed me toward Ann, who was working at the Canteen but also owned a gallery down the street. I spoke with her and she invited me and my group to stop by the gallery that day. 

Ann and Shirley are the two co-owners of the gallery, called the Appalachian Creativity Center, and what we expected to be a quick stop-in turned into over an hour of conversation with the two of them. We admired the mosaic work, stained glass, and woven baskets that had been produced at the creativity center, some even done by Ann and Shirley themselves. I bought a stained glass reading light and a bird painting. Shirley explained how she teaches various art classes, and people from Connellsville are quick to sign up. The classes fill up in a matter of days. She also mentioned that she has a wide range of ages among her students, some of them being teenagers from the local middle school and high school. This was a moment that clicked for my partners on the project and me. We realized there might be an opportunity here to combine the assets of art and an engaged younger generation to create something inspiring.

The urban studies team’s primary area of focus being Connellsville, situated along the Youghiogheny River, and located twenty minutes from Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater site made this visit even more engaging because we got a chance to visualize local assets for the first time in person. Proximity to Fallingwater, an architectural masterpiece that attracts many visitors on a yearly basis, has been one of the town’s biggest assets for attracting new business. Connellsville is also on the brink of another tourism increase, as it’s now a stop along the Great Allegheny Passage (GAP) Trail. This running and bike trail connects Pittsburgh to Washington, D.C., bringing a much heavier stream of visitors into the town as a stop along their journey. Connellsville has also become a hub of arts and culture through the Fayette County Cultural Trust, one of a handful of local organizations fostering the creativity scene in the area. Our current idea for a project is to combine the abundance of arts-driven community members and the influx of tourism to create what we’re calling the Connellsville Sticker Project. The idea is that we, with the help of Ann and Shirley. will invite students at the Appalachian Creativity Center to create designs showcasing the most iconic landmarks and assets of the town. Drawings could feature nearby state parks, the river, popular businesses, industrial history, and public art. Ultimately the creativity would be in the hands of the young students.

Once designs are collected, they’ll be sent to The Ink Spot, a print shop in Connellsville that can produce stickers in bulk. This way, the project stimulates another local business in the process. Then any business who is interested can take a stack of these stickers and hand them out as visitors pass through town and locals visit their favorite spots. The cherry on top will be a final access point for tourists—the trail head shelters. Along the GAP trail, there are overnight shelters where runners and bikers can spend the night, including at a spot in Connellsville. If stickers are available to them in those places, they’ll be the perfect souvenir, and might even incentivise them to spend some time in town, exploring the assets from the stickers for themselves. They can put these stickers on their bike helmets or water bottles, for example, bringing tokens of Connellsville with them anywhere they go.

Course readings have discussed asset mapping as a tool for visualizing a town’s strengths. The visual element is important because it turns a list of assets into a network of them, showing how they’re related to each other, where they are in proximity to each other, and where the town’s most valuable strengths are concentrated. Spending time in Connellsville in person helped us make our own mental asset maps, developing an understanding of which places foster a strong sense of community by attracting regulars. We got a better sense of which places the town valued as most important, with much of the downtown development centered around the Canteen, the Carnegie Public Library, and the Youghiogheny River.

Readings have also discussed the importance of place-based development and place-based pride. Urban planners can create the perfect utopian vision of a town they’ve never been to, and it might be functional, and even enjoyable, but the deep cultural understanding of local stakeholders can’t be replicated by outsiders. For us, spending time in Connellsville and talking to different community members was the best way to understand the vibrance of the community and come up with projects that excite people.