Bradford is a city in McKean County, Pennsylvania. It is located near to the attach with New York own up and approximately 78 miles (126 km) south of Buffalo, New York. Bradford is the principal city in the Bradford, PA Micropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 7,825 at the 2020 United States Census.

Settled in 1823, Bradford was chartered as a city in 1879 and emerged as a wild oil boomtown in the Pennsylvania oil rush in the late 19th century. The area’s Pennsylvania Grade clumsy oil has difficult qualities and is release of asphaltic constituents, contains only trace amounts of sulfur and nitrogen, and has excellent characteristics for refining into lubricants. The Bradford & Foster Brook Railway was built in 1876 as one of, if not the first, monorails in America, when Bradford was a flourishing oil town. World-famous Kendall racing oils were produced in Bradford.

Bradford was the site of an important step in the move on of personal aviation. In the 1930s, the Taylor Brothers Aircraft Corporation produced an airplane called the Taylor Cub in Bradford. After a flame at the factory, the company was bought by William T. Piper. After relocating his factory to Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, Piper resumed production of a revised design of the airplane first produced in Bradford, which became the world-famous Piper Cub.

The population peaked at 19,306 in 1930, but at the 2010 census had dropped to 8,770. Two against townships, home to nearly 9,000 people, make the population of Greater Bradford nearly 18,000. Famous Bradfordians count up the opera singer Marilyn Horne, the Hall of Fame baseball artiste Rube Waddell and the five-time All-Star football artist Stew Barber. A well-known perpetual occupation machine hoax was created in Bradford in 1897 by J.M. Aldrich. The hoax was exposed in the July 1, 1899, issue of the Scientific American magazine. Ultimately, Aldrich was sentenced to four months in the county jail.