Williamsburg Borough

The Williamsburg Boro Historic District was entered onto the National Register of Historic Places in 1995. The text, below, was transcribed from a copy of the original nomination document.

Significance

Between c. 1800 and 1831, Willlamsburg functioned as a milling and iron-making settlement that traded periodically with rafts on the Juniata River and Conestoga wagons on the Huntingdon, Cambria and Indiana Turnpike. With the opening of the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal in 1832, the town operated as a canal port for iron manufacturers and local farmers until 1875. During the post-Civil War period (1877-1902), after the canal went out of business and was replaced by a railroad, Williamsburg increasingly became a commercial center for local stone quarries and a market town for growing farms in the area. With the construction of a large paper mill in 1903, the town shifted its commercial focus again, this time toward the manufacture of paper products. Overall, the significance of the Williamsburg Historic District lies in its ability to accurately convey a physical sense of the town's commercial and architectural development through these periods of local history.

Williamsburg was originally known as Aketown, named after Jacob Ake (1754-1838), a German immigrant who founded the town in 1795. Ake hired Patrick Cassidy (1744-1828), a well-known surveyor from Newry, PA, to lay out his new town in August 1795. Cassidy, who drew up many of the oldest town plans in Huntingdon and Blair Counties, created a variation on the ancient orthogonal pattern first established in Pennsylvania by William Penn's 1682 plan for Philadelphia. Williamsburg has a regular grid layout with a central public square at the intersection of High and First (Front) Streets, its two main streets. Around this square, often called a "diamond" in central Pennsylvania, Cassidy provided for 120 fifth-of-an-acre lots that Ake leased for an annual ground rent, a fairly common regional practice that continued in Williamsburg well into the late 19th century. The borough acquired its present name about 1810 when Jacob Ake renamed the town for his son William.

The district's most significant natural feature is "The Big Spring," a five-million-gallon-a-day natural limestone spring that emerges out of a hillside at the south end of town at Union and High Streets. The spring was the principal reason, besides access to the Juniata River, for Jacob Ake's location of his town on an oxbow bend in the river. Ake moved here in 1790 from Washington County, MD, after purchasing 600 acres, much of which fronted on the Juniata River. Ake intended to create a settlement based on the Big Spring's potential to turn mill wheels. Indeed! Throughout Williamsburg's history the spring has provided a harnessable source of hydro power for local industry.

By 1800, the spring was turning water wheels for grist and saw mills at the southwest corner of Spring and Second Streets, a site now occupied by the borough building. By 1857, the spring was powering the bellows of an iron furnace at the northeast corner of First and Spring Streets (demolished and cleared). Between 1905 and 1974, the spring also provided a vital source of pure water for paper production.

Before the opening of the Pennsylvania Canal, Williamsburg's early growth was modest. By 1810, 15 years after the town's founding, Williamsburg contained only 34 developed lots, out of the 120 originally laid out. Like many of the oldest towns in the region, early commerce centered around a grist and saw mill and a leather tannery. Between 1815 and 1832, commercial trade was limited to pack-horse traders and wagons from the Cambria Huntingdon & Indiana Turnpike, the area's main road located five miles out of town (now PA Rt. 22).

Commercial trade from the river was seasonal, dependent upon spring floods that allowed rafts to move downstream to the Susquehanna River and the Chesapeake Bay. The area's principal occupations were fanning and various labor-intensive jobs related to charcoal-based iron smelting. Between 1809 and 1885, for example, four charcoal-fired iron furnaces and three forges operated within a five-mile radius of town. During this pre-canal period, the village functioned primarily as a market town and manufacturing (iron) and processing center (wool, saw and grist mills). Fanners in Morrison's Cove, a broad fertile valley just to the south in Woodbury Township, used Williamsburg for various services. By the 1820s, for example, the village contained blacksmiths, barrel makers, distillers, weavers, leather tanners, cobblers, shopkeepers, stable operators, and tavern keepers. Williamsburg physical development confined itself primarily to Ake's original subdivision, which consisted of High and First Streets, the principal cross streets that intersect at the diamond, and Plum and Spring Streets that run parallel to High (see Appendix A). By 1827, the village had apparently grown sufficiently for the town leaders to seek incorporation from the state as a borough. While no known early industrial structures survive from this period, several houses from the period remain along First Street.

In 1832, the Pennsylvania Main Line Canal opened. This early state public-works project, built to compete against New York's Erie Canal, followed the Juniata Valley upstream from the Susquehanna River to Hollidaysburg just west of Williamsburg. Canal boats were transferred at Hollidaysburg to the Portage Railroad for passage over the Allegheny Mountains. In Johnstown, they were transferred back to the canal and towed by mules or horses to Pittsburgh. The state canal was never financially successful, but until railroads replaced canals as the commercial transport system of choice in the 10508, the system provided Pennsylvania with a major transportation artery between the eastern port of Philadelphia and the western frontier gateway of Pittsburgh via the Ohio River.

Trade with the canal, which ran through town along the northern edge of First Street, accelerated Williamsburg's growth as a market town and inland port for iron-making, farming and associated commerce. However, the canal's dominance as the region's prime commercial carrier lasted only 20 years until 1852 when the Pennsylvania Railroad Company (PRR) opened its Main Line between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The PRR, which provided faster and more reliable service bypassed Williamsburg leaving the town out of the region's new transportation system. While the canal did not close immediately, passenger service and premium cargos soon abandoned the waterway for the railroad. Canal towns like Williamsburg and Alexandria, the next substantial town downstream, suffered commercially and their growth slowed. Fortunately for Williamsburg, the canal remained open until 1875, carrying heavy bulk cargos like pig iron, forged bar Iron and quarried limestone, all produced locally.(l) Within this period, between the bypass of Williamsburg by the PRR and the opening of a branch rail line in 1873, the town's primary industry was the Williamsburg Paper Manufacturing Company, operator of the Juniata Iron Furnace at the foot of Spring Street next to the river (outside the historic district). Only a very disturbed below-ground site remains here. The furnace, which burned anthracite coal shipped by canal boat from the Wilkes-Barre region in northeast Pennsylvania, was built in 1857 by John K. Neff to supply pig iron to the PRR's foundry in Altoona.

The PRR's Williamsburg branch line opened in 1873, and two years later the canal was abandoned altogether by the railroad company. By this time, local limestone quarries and iron ore mines, which supplied the iron industry in Johnstown and Pittsburgh, were helping carry the local economy. Iron furnace and quarry workers were drawn to Willlamsburg for shopping and entertainment. Farmers received and shipped goods at the rail depot, and transacted business with various store keepers and tradesmen. Together, these activities kept the town afloat economically during much of the late 19th century.

The paper-mill era began with the opening of the Williamsburg Paper Manufacturing Company in 1905. By 1900, the town's economy had grown depressed --the local iron-making industry had already collapsed in the late 1880s due to cut-throat competition from larger, more modern competitors in Pittsburgh and Johnstown. Several local limestone quarries had also lost substantial business as the regional steel industry had sought new raw material suppliers in the mid west, and small-scale local iron production had declined sharply. In 1902, a group of local leaders approached Charles M. Schwab (1862-1939), the former president of United States Steel Company and Bethlehem Steel Company, and persuaded him to build a paper mill in Williamsburg. Schwab, who had been born just outside of town, then lived in Loretto (Cambria County), but because of family ties continued to regard Williamsburg as his hometown. Attracted by the Big Spring's supply of clean water necessary for paper production, Schwab agreed to the proposal and underwrote the construction of a large new paper mill built between 1903 and 1905.

The mill, officially known as the Williamsburg Manufacturing Company, became Blair County's third such operation. The county's first paper mill was established in 1865 in the town of Roaring Spring, the second in 1878 in Tyrone north of Altoona. Unlike the Roaring Spring, which its founding family controlled until the 1960s, the Tyrone and Williamsburg mills were bought out (in 1899 and 1906 respectively) by a large New York firm, the West Virginia Pulp & Paper Co. (Westvaco). Construction overruns initially made the Williamsburg plant very unprofitable, forcing Schwab to sell out at a substantial loss to Westvaco. Schwab continued to serve as a patron of the town until his death in 1939, despite being financially embarrassed by the new mill. He became a director of the First National Bank, built a downtown hotel, and developed mill worker housing at the east end of town. Under new ownership, the Williamsburg mill became the town's economic mainstay for the next 70 years. During its best years, the paper mill produced high-grade book paper for lithography and glossy stock for expensive publications. At one it supplied stock for the Saturday Evening Post in Philadelphia. Its peak years, and indeed the town's, were the 1920s when seven trains a day stopped in Williamsburg for various reasons. Through this period of prosperity, Williamsburg drew larger numbers of people from around the immediate region, especially on weekends when its sidewalks became crowded with moviegoers, shoppers, and people attending various social club functions.

In 1900, on the eve of the paper mill era, Williamsburg's population stood at just 935. Historically, its population had grown rather slowly through the previous century despite the commercial stimulus of the canal and railroad. Between 1840 and 1890, for example, the population rose by a little over 250 from 637 to 888. This modest increase occurred despite the fact that limestone and ganister quarries just outside of town employed about 1,000 workers by the end of the century. Due to the mill's growth, however, the borough's numbers rose rapidly during the first decades of the century. By 1960, the population had increased to 1,790. Since that time, with the closing of the mill in 1974, the population fell to 1,400 in 1980 and posted a slight rebound to 1,456 by 1990.

When the mill closed in 1974, it had been reduced to producing corrugated stock for packaging and boxes, a far cry from its glory days of making expensive glossy stock in the 1920s. The complex of some 15 brick and stone buildings sat vacant until being demolished in 1979-80. The former owner, Westvaco, operates a modern envelope manufacturing plant located next to the site, now landscaped into a grassy field just west the historic district.

The local significance of the historic district is two-fold: It is found in the large number and range of surviving historic resources, which under Criteria A are associated with the broad patterns of Williamsburg's commercial and architectural history. While many of these resources may lack individual distinction, as a whole they possess distinctive characteristics of several historic methods of construction and styles of architecture that represent, the town's local historic significance between c. 1800 and 1944.

Most buildings from Williamsburg s earliest years, before the advent of the canal, were made of logs and generally were built in one of two forms: the one-room-deep I-House and the two-room deep Georgian type. Although log construction is popularly associated with primitive frontier life/ many of the examples found in Williamsburg, like many others that survive throughout the region, are often quite large, surpassing the one-room log cabin stereotype. A dramatic example is the Fluke House at 436 W. Second Street, a large log house from c. 1830 remodeled some time in the 18708, judging by its Gothic Revival detailing. Since expanded substantially in the rear, the house was originally built as a double-pile Georgian type. It now stands as an interesting local example of a vernacular domestic building that was expanded and remodeled by a later generation in a new style bearing little resemblance to its original appearance.

In the late 18th to early 19th century, hand-hewn log construction joined by V-notches, the typical mid-Atlantic notching method, was the common man's affordable alternative to masonry construction throughout central and western Pennsylvania. Log buildings could be quickly erected by skilled hands, and once made watertight by chinking, were extremely durable if properly maintained. Wood siding, which was generally clapboard, provided added insulation and a more refined finish, especially for in-town houses. One example is the gable-front Firemen's Auxiliary building constructed about 1830 at 416 W. Second Street. This structure was originally built as a house for the Schmucker family but has undergone several commercial renovations since then. Like the Firemen's Auxiliary! All of the known log houses in the district are preserved under wooden siding, which is often covered in turn by modern synthetic siding. The relatively large number of surviving log buildings in the district (6 percent or 21 of 348 contributing dwellings) is not unusual given their regional context --many older yet smaller settlements in central Pennsylvania have not experienced substantial change and still retain large numbers of these structures, due to the remarkable durability of the material when maintained.

During the heyday of the Pennsylvania Canal ( 1832-1852), the commercial and architectural character of Williamsburg was largely influenced by trade with the canal. The village center filled in with more houses, churches, shops, and small cottage industries. A woolen mill, making carpets, yarn and blankets, was powered by the Big Spring between the early 1830s and 1850s. An iron foundry, established in 1855 at the foot of Spring Street, provided hardware for the canal trade, but was absorbed by the Juniata Iron Furnace in 1857. None of the buildings from these early industries survive.

Some of the oldest log buildings were replaced by brick homes for the more affluent, although log remained a common alternative for the working class. Several good examples of the new brick construction from the 1830s include the Samuel Royer House at 226 High Street. Royer was a member of a locally prominent iron-making family that operated a furnace and forge at separate locations outside of town. The flemish-bond facade of his house is typical of regional brick-masonry construction before the railroad (pre-1852), when building materials tended to be handcrafted, not factory-made, and produced locally rather than rail shipped from beyond an immediate locale. Since flemish bond was more difficult and, therefore, more expensive to create, its application was usually limited to front facades, such as those of the Royer House and two other houses pictured in photo #l. By contrast, the side walls of these houses were built using the less difficult and expensive common bond method. Another more substantial example is the John K. Neff House built in the 1830s. Neff (1802-1876) operated the village gristmill in 1830, but would establish the Juniata Iron Furnace at the foot of Spring Street in 1857. His large brick house, suitable for a well-to-do , was built overlooking the Big Spring, which he used to power his gristmill and the machinery for his iron furnace.

The district's oldest surviving church building dates from the canal era. Designed and built for the Presbyterians in 1841 by David S. Rhule (d. 1887), this late Federal style church, at 509-15 W. Second Street, was actually the Presbyterian's second building, replacing an 1824 building that had stood within the Presbyterian cemetery at Union Street and Clover Creek Road. Rhule, who was Williamsburg's most prominent early 19th century builder, built the Blair County Jail in 1868 and subcontracted to Williamsburg's mainstream religious denominations reflected the 19th century ethnic make-up of the community.

Presbyterians, for example, were generally Scotch-Irish. Lutherans, German Reformed and Methodists were generally German. Baptists tended to be German, English or Scandinavian. The last major denomination to establish a parish church was St. Joseph's Roman catholic, founded in 1860. Many of the local Roman Catholics were late 19th to early 20th century immigrants from eastern and southern Europe, who worked in the stone quarries at nearby Ganister and Carlim. Some of town's earliest Catholics were Irish laborers who settled in Williamsburg after the Pennsylvania Canal was completed in 1832. As with the Roman Catholic parish, many of the town's churches drew their worshipers from beyond the borough, thereby helping extend Williamsburg's commercial role to a cultural one as well.

By the early 20th century that role had expanded Into education since Williamsburg now served as the immediate region's center for public secondary school education. The Williamsburg High School building, the oldest surviving public school in the district, dates from 1918 when population growth induced by the paper mill compelled the construction of a larger building. The three-story brick core section was designed in a Classical Revival mode. As the town grew with the mill, more additions were made to the school, one of which was underwritten by the WPA in 1933. After 1852, the decline of commercial trade on the Pennsylvania Canal significantly slowed the development of Williamsburg. The canal continued to operate until 1875 under the Pennsylvania Railroad's ownership, largely as a low-profit styles and construction techniques being adopted across the country. As a result of this homogenizing process, Williamsburg's building trades gradually abandoned older regional traditions, like log construction and flemish-bond brickwork, and joined a new national mainstream of American building practice and style. In this sense, the late 19th to early 20thcentury buildings in the historic district are typical, not extraordinary, examples of architectural styles and construction techniques found in many towns across central Pennsylvania. Their significance lies not their stylistic distinctiveness, but in their power to demonstrate how architectural styles and construction practices in central Pennsylvania became homogeneous with national trends in the decades following the Civil War.

One prominent example of this trend is the Schmucker House at 417 W. Second Street (five-bay brick house). Built in the late 1870s, this Gothic Revival brick house, owned since 1912 by the Fraternal Order of the Eagles is typical of the limited examples of redevelopment that occurred within the village between the canal and paper mill eras. As part of a national trend, the Gothic Revival look became especially popular in small towns of central and western Pennsylvania for several decades after the Civil War. This house still possesses exceptional decorative ironwork on its front porch, a product, no doubt, of either local or regional iron smiths, but just as plausibly manufactured by an out-of-state iron manufacturer who rail-shipped his products.

In the early 1900s, the paper mill became more than Williamsburg's principal employer, it became the town's principal catalyst for development. In 1905, the mill's first year of operation, several hundred workers were hired, most requiring new housing. In response, Charles Schwab built worker houses at the east side of town, expanding the street grid beyond Spring Street where the original town plan had ended. In the 300 blocks of East Third and Fourth Streets, he built dozens of homes in a neighborhood still known locally as Schwabtown. These buildings were primarily large wood-frame gable-front houses. During the same period before the First World War, the west end of town expanded as well, extending out Second and Third Streets beyond Black Street to Taylor and Dean Streets where nearly 100 new houses were built. Whether by design or accident, the new east side development became a blue-collar neighborhood, while the west side became predominately white-collar. By contrast with the older village area, which had filled-in with development during the canal era, these paper-mill era neighborhoods of single-family houses conveyed a more suburban ideal, with larger front and side yards. Unlike the village area, where stores, offices, and social institutions intermixed with houses, they were almost exclusively residential with few, if any, shops within their blocks.

The paper-mill era produced the district's largest number of gable-front and four-square house types. A limited number of slightly higher style Queen Anne houses were also built, usually for merchants, businessmen and mill managers. Most of the Queen Annes built in the early 1900s are late examples of this eclectic style, often trimmed with neoclassical or Colonial Revival details. A substantial number of four-square types were also built, sometimes modestly detailed with Craftsman or neoclassical trim. In the 1920s and 1930s, a limited number of wood-frame and brick bungalows appeared.

By the mid-1930s, Williamsburg's growth had slowed. Construction was limited to new house infill scattered among existing neighborhoods, and to some replacement of older commercial buildings around the commercial village area. Part of the reason could be traced to the Great Depression, but perhaps a larger reason was the tremendous damage done to the paper mill by the St. Patrick's Day Flood of 1936, the most destructive flood to hit Williamsburg and much of the region in its history. The town did not expand again in any significant way until after the Second World War when a tract of farm land south of West Third Street was subdivided for residential development. This area, served by Sage Hill Drive, contains a typical variety of modest post-war suburban houses, but has been excluded from the historic district because the development dates from beyond the district's period of significance.

An excellent example of a more commercial looking building from the late 19th century is the former First National Bank at the southeast corner of High and Second Street. The only example of the Second Empire style in the district, this three-story brick building was erected in 1873 as a branch of the First National Bank of Hollidaysburg, which failed in 1896. Two years later, the building reopened as the Farmers Bank, and operated as such until 1903 when it became nationally chartered as the First National Bank of Williamsburg. The large bay windows of the ground floor date from remodeling sometime between 1896 and 1903. The current noncontributing steel-frame doorway was added in the 1960s. In the 1870s to 1890s, the building's upper floors probably functioned as a hotel with meeting rooms. This use was certainly true of the six-bay Federal style house on East Second Street next door to the bank. Originally built as a private home during the 1830s, it had been converted to a hotel by the 1870s. Other dwellings in the district, like the Samuel Schrnucker House at 420-22 W. Second Street, saw their ground floors converted to commercial use as the need for commercial space grew with the prosperity brought by the paper mill. The two-and-one-half-story brick dwelling was built in 1844, originally as a three-bay Greek Revival house (four roof dormers). The building has been associated much longer, however, with the Pattersons, a family locally prominent in business and politics, who enlarged the house by two bays sometime during the 1870s to 1880s. In 1909, George 3. Patterson remodeled the ground floor of the two-bay addition into a storefront for his Farmers and Merchants Bank. Patterson's carpenter created a rather old-fashioned Italianate-like storefront with bracketed cornice, a look quite out of step with current fashion. A new bank in 1909, would normally have called for a Classical Revival facade. Patterson, however, may well have known his customers better, realizing that for rural farmers and small-town merchants a familiar look was more reassuring than new untested styles that smacked of big-city ways. This largely intact storefront now houses the Williamsburg Public Library.

A large number of social and fraternal clubs existed in Williamsburg through the late 19th to early 20th centuries. This multiplicity of social organizations was fairly characteristic of many small central Pennsylvania communities. Various clubs and societies typically met in the downtown area in meeting halls often located above storefront buildings. A local example of this arrangement is the Firemen's Auxiliary building at 416 W. Second Street, which maintains a second-floor meeting hall originally created in 1888 for the Civil War Veterans Association. The ground floor has served a variety of commercial enterprises including general store, department store, and auto parts supply. Like most historic mixed-use properties in the commercial area of the district, the building is domestic in character, while its site placement, with no front yard and extremely narrow side yards, is urban in character.

One of the village's fully commercial buildings was the Schwab Hotel, built by Charles Schwab in 1911 at 223 High Street. This boxy three-story building, which often hosted businessmen traveling to the paper mill, stood out in the village with its unusual cream-colored brick walls. Converted to apartments in more recent years, its vernacular exterior remains little changed from its original appearance in 1911. A commercial building from the same era exhibiting a little more style due to its function is the former Dean Theatre, built about 1911 at 415 W. Second Street. Closed as a theater since 1957, its Roman classical detailing surely attracted many to its doorways n the century when Williamsburg attracted overflow crowds on weekend evenings.

The architectural and commercial significance of Williamsburg is best understood In its context with four other towns in the region: the Huntingdon County borough of Alexandria, and the Blair County boroughs of Hollidaysburg, Roaring Spring and Tyrone. Alexandria, Hollidaysburg and Williamsburg all began as small settlements founded in the 1790s along the upper Juniata River. All three developed architecturally and commercially in similar ways until the early 1830s when the Pennsylvania Canal connected the trio as the last three port towns east of the Allegheny Mountains. Differences arose from that point forward.

Hollidaysburg became a magnet for commerce as a terminal for canal boats transferring to rail cars for transit over the mountains. Because of that role, Hollidaysburg evolved into a regional transportation center. In 1846, in large measure due to its commercial importance, the borough was selected as the seat for newly created Blair County. This combination of governmental seat and regional shipping terminal gave Hollidaysburg distinct advantages over Williamsburg and Alexandria, affecting its rate of growth and architectural character. Hollidaysburg's domestic and commercial architecture became more stylistically sophisticated. Unlike Williamsburg, for example, none of the its early log buildings survive due to successive waves of redevelopment that removed many of its oldest buildings through the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

When the canal terminal closed in the early 1870s, Hollidaysburg was already relatively well insulated from the economic shock. A rail link to the Pennsylvania Railroad's main trunk line in Altoona had already been established. The town boasted as well a larger concentration of merchants and industrialists with better access to capital. Just one example of this financial connection is the quick redevelopment of the abandoned canal basin into iron foundries, furnaces, and a railyard. Williamsburg, despite its proximity to limestone quarries and iron ore mines, failed to grow significantly after the railroad replaced the canal. The town was literally off the main line, removed from the commercial mainstream that the business communities of Altoona and Hollidaysburg enjoyed with their links to Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. This period of stagnation, though economically unfortunate, resulted in the survival of a higher number of older buildings and the construction of smaller numbers of late Victorian examples. Only after the founding of the paper mill in 1905 did the town experience significant growth again, reflected in its more substantial stock of early 20th century architecture.

Alexandria began its existence much like Williamsburg and Hollidaysburg – a small river hamlet with a gristmill and several tradesmen's shops established in 1793. Like Williamsburg and Hollidaysburg, it grew steadily as a port town on the Pennsylvania Canal between 1832 and 1852, a period of growth reflected in its notable collection of late Federal-style architecture. In the 1850s, however, when the Pennsylvania Railroad bypassed Alexandria and Williamsburg for a more northern route, Alexandria's population and commercial growth stagnated. The town remained a backwater until the early 1890s when the PRR extended the Williamsburg branch line through town to Petersburg where it connected with the Main Line. Like Williamsburg, Alexandria's much reduced growth after 1852 is reflected in its architecture. Many of its more prominent houses, mostly late Federal examples, were built during the canal era. Its next largest collection of housing, mostly vernacular examples of Colonial Revival and Craftsman types, dates from the early 1900s when a firebrick manufacturer built a factory in 1904 just outside of town. Federal Refractories Company, which made firebrick linings for steel furnaces and boilers, supplied the Pittsburgh steel industry until the 1970s although its greatest productivity occurred in the 1900-1920s.

Roaring Spring and Tyrone, by contrast, were younger communities that managed to avoid the economic doldrums caused by changing transportation routes and systems that Williamsburg and Alexandria experienced, Tyrone, north of Altoona on the Juniata River, had been located since its founding on the PRR's Main Line. By 1878, when its paper mill was built, it already boasted a significant PRR railyard operation and other associated industries. Roaring Spring, on the other hand, was not connected to a PRR branch line until 1871. That connection, however, made a significant impact on its future development by opening regional and national markets to the town's locally owned paper mill. In the case of both towns, the rail connection also had a transformational effect on their architectural development, a fact reflected today in their variety of late 19th century architecture.

Like Williamsburg, the regional characteristics of early 19th century vernacular architecture disappeared during the second half of the 19th century in all of these towns due to the various affects of the railroad and the industrial revolution. With rail access to the outside world and other improvements in communications, like the telegraph, and with the rise of mass markets and national merchandising, the new building styles and methods that appeared almost simultaneously in these towns reflected nation-wide trends rather than regional vernacular traditions. The result was a national homogeneity of building styles rather than just a regional homogeneity. As one example, a typical late Federal-style brick house, built in a small town anywhere in central Pennsylvania during the 1830s, likely possessed the same commonalities as an equivalent house built in eastern or western Pennsylvania, or even Ohio, during the same period --as long as it was located within the same cultural migration path of pioneer settlement. By the 1910s, however, following the nation-wide affects of late 19th century modernization, a wood-frame, four-square house, whether built for a paper-mill employee or a brick refractory worker in central Pennsylvania, now possessed the same similarity on a nation-wide scale with a four-square house built for, say, a shoe factory worker in New England or a farmer in the Mid West.

The result is that the architectural context for Williamsburg and its neighboring towns in central Pennsylvania should be understood from within a regional cultural context before the coming of the railroad, and from a national context after the railroad and the associated modernizing affects of the industrial revolution during the second half of the 19th century.

In summary, the Williamsburg Historic District is locally significant for its collection of historic resources significant in the areas of Architecture and Commerce between c. 1800 and 1944. Overall, the significance of the historic district is found in its ability to accurately convey an architectural sense of the town's commercial and architectural development through this 144-year period of local history.

END NOTES

1. Commerce from the canal declined in stages: the opening of the Pennsylvania Railroad Company's (PRR) Main Line in 1852 marked the beginning of the end. Not only was the canal unable to compete against faster, more reliable service offered by the railroad, the PRR also soon purchased the canal system from the Commonwealth. The PRR closed the canal from Williamsburg to Hollidaysburg in 1872, leaving the system intact downstream from Williamsburg toward Huntingdon for only three more years. In 1873, a PRR branch line from Hollidaysburg to Williamsburg was completed, following most of the route occupied by the canal.

Major Bibliographic Sources

• Africa, J. Simpson. History of Huntingdon and Blair Counties, Pennsylvania. Vol I. Philadelphia: Louis H. Everts, 1883.
• Fitzsimons, Gray. Editor. Blair County and Cambria County, Pennsylvania: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites. Washington, D.C.: Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record, National Park Service, 1990.
• Jones, U.J. History of the Early Settlement of the Juniata Valley. Philadelphia, 1856.
• Metz, William Ray. A History of Williamsburg and the Hereabouts in Story and Rhyme of People, Places and Things as Found in My Valley of Beautiful Memories. Manuscript collection of the Williamsburg Heritage and Historical Society, 1963.
• A. Pomeroy & Co. Atlas of Blair and Huntingdon Counties, Pennsylvania, 1873. Philadelphia: A. Pomeroy & Co., 1873.
• Rupp, I.D. History and Topography of Northumberland, Huntingdon, Mifflin, Centre, Union, Columbia, Juniata, and Clinton Counties, -PA. Lancaster, 1847.
• Sanborn Map Company. Williamsburg, PA. New York: Sanborn Map Company, 1904, 1910, 1924.
• Sell, Jesse C. Twentieth Century History of Altoona and Blair County, Pennsylvania and Representative Citizens. Chicago: Richmond-Arnold Publishing Co., 1911.
• Shedd, Nancy S. Huntingdon County, PA: An Inventory of Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites. Washington, D.C.: Historic American Building Survey/Historic American Engineering Record: National Park Service, 1991.
• Spangler, Marie. A History of Williamsburg. Manuscript collection of the Williamsburg Heritage and Historical Society, c. 1959.
• Stotz, Charles M. The Architectural Heritage of Early Western Pennsylvania: A Record of Buildings to 1860. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1966.
• Williamsburg Heritage & Historical Society. Archival Collection of the Society. Williamsburg Bicentennial Book Committee. Williamsburg, PA: 200 Years, 1790-1990. Privately published, 1990.
• Williamsburg Bicentennial Celebration Committee. Williamsburg Pennsylvania Bicentennial Community. Privately published, 1976.
• Wolf, George A., editor. Blair County's First Hundred Years: 1846-1946. Altoona: The Mirror Press, 1945.