Prospect Borough, rooted in the early 1800s, takes it name from its first shopkeeper, George Kirkpatrick.

“We’re a high point here in Butler County and he looked over the land and supposedly said, ‘What a wonderful prospect for a town,’ ” said Mary Harmon, former president of the Prospect Preservation Society. “It stuck, the name ‘Prospect.’”

Built along the Venango Path Native American trail, Prospect was laid out in 1825 by Andrew McGown, according to “An Historical Gazetteer of Butler County” by Luanne Eisler and Glee McKnight.

McGowan, James McCullough and John “Jackey” Jones all provided portions of their own farms to form the town.

But Jones, according to Harmon, is perhaps the best remembered of the town’s founding fathers as a character around whom many stories grew.

“Being a Scotsman, he liked his alcohol,” she said, laughing.

According to local lore, Jones is responsible for bending Franklin Street — and, eventually Route 528 — noticeably west as it passes through the borough.

“As the town was laid out, if you didn’t have the traffic coming close to your business then you would lose out on money,” Harmon said.

Some stories say that Jones ran a drinking establishment on his property, Harmon said. Others say that he did not want a long driveway leading out of his home, decreasing the value of his property.

“He had a place just north of the intersection,” Harmon said. “So it’s been told — and I cannot prove this, I do not have artifacts or anything to prove that — knowing the road was coming, he kind of bribed some of the people doing the survey to sort of just take a sharp left.”

The surveyors agreed, according to the legend, after Jones’ bribe apparently left them in “good spirits.”

“He was an eccentric fellow,” Harmon said with a chuckle. “I think you had these men coming out and he said, ‘Hey, who would like a good shot of whiskey?”

And when Jones was not busy rerouting historic paths, Harmon said he spent his time scaring the other townsfolk sober.

“He would get pretty plastered sometimes and on what is now (Route) 528 north, there was a guy that did gunpowder,” Harmon said, related some lore about Jones. “Well, Jackey got drunk and went in there to lay down and just sleep it off.”

Jones made it into the building without the busy owner noticing, laid down by the fireplace and fell asleep.

“Something happened that there was a lot of noise, and Jackey Jones jumped up,” Harmon said. “He had supposedly wore almost like a coonskin cap that has the tails and such, flying around.”

The owner stared in horror as Jones leapt to his feet, hat flailing, silhouetted by the roaring fire behind him.

“(The owner) thought the devil had come up from hell,” Harmon said. “And the gunpowder guy quit drinking — he never drank after that.”

Jones’ dubious exploits made him something of a mythical figure in the borough, Harmon said.

“He had a good heart though,” she said. “The property where the Presbyterian Church sits had been a part of his property. He donated that to the church.”

The borough was formally incorporated in 1846, and by 1881 “its businesses included two wagon makers, four general stores, four blacksmiths, two hotels, a dentist, a physician and one undertaker,” Eisler and McKnight wrote.

And 50 years later, as automobiles took the nation by storm, Harmon said the borough began paving its muddy streets.

Until the 1920s what is now Route 488 through Prospect was known as Muddy Street.

“Because, hey, you didn’t have paved roads,” Harmon said. “And when you had the spring thaws and all the rain you ended up, usually your horse and buggy, slogging through all this muck and mud.”

Fearing the muddy streets would be a hindrance for the increasing number of automobiles, borough council hired a company to pave the road in 1927. That involved bringing a railroad to town.

“They came in and they laid railroad tracks — small gauge tracks — from the east end of prospect to the west end of Prospect,” Harmon said.

Workers then hauled cement from a plant in present-day Lake Arthur to the east end of the tracks, loaded it on a train and began paving the road, piece by piece.

“As they laid the cement, they’d have a section of tracks and they would remove that and fill it in with cement,” Harmon said. “Then they’d remove another section and then lay cement — they worked their way from the east back to the west then.”

Initially christened Route 70, according to Harmon, the road would become Route 488, intersecting with Jones’ misshapen Route 528 at the heart of the borough.

“To me that was a major thing, to bring hard surfaces for the new cars coming in the ’20s so they wouldn’t be getting stuck in the mud,” Harmon said. “And, of course, that makes the town a little more stabilized too.”

The Prospect Preservation Society, located at these crossroads, still has a railroad spike from the project in its collection.

The historical society was founded during Prospect’s 175th anniversary in 2000 to keep the town’s story alive, said Harmon, a founding member of the society.

“The mission moving forward is the same as that group that first got together, and that was to find and keep artifacts, information for the education of the future generations,” Harmon said. “If you don’t know where you come from, you don’t know where you’re going.”