Cambria City Historic District

Cambria City is a dense urban neighborhood of two-story vernacular houses built on a grid three blocks wide and ten blocks long in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. Cambria Iron Company's David and James P. McConaughy laid out its lots in 1853 for workers at the nearby ironworks, and the street grid was rebuilt after the 1889 flood. Most of the houses were built between 1890 and 1920 for mill and mine employees, and they are typically two-bay singles or four-bay doubles set close together. The district contains ten churches, most built between 1901 and 1922, which reflect the successive waves of immigrants from south and east central Europe. Five of them were designed by architects including Walter Myton and John T. Comes, and they display Gothic, Romanesque, Renaissance and Byzantine styles. The neighborhood is also associated with the Germania Brewery of 1907, the 1914 Minersville Bridge, and the Mayer slaughterhouse of 1908. It is regarded as the best preserved example of a working-class ethnic neighborhood tied to the Cambria Iron Company in the Johnstown area.