High Street Historic District

Along both sides of High Street in Pottstown, a lineal district of mansions and substantial houses built between 1860 and 1941 follows the main east-west road from Adams Street to Rosedale Drive. The homes were built for industrialists, merchants and managers during the borough's industrial boom, and most were erected in a concentration between 1875 and 1928. Architectural styles include Queen Anne, American Four Square, Victorian Gothic, Italianate and Georgian Revival, with some houses ranging from 2 to 3-1/2 stories and lots up to 100 feet wide. Large twin houses were designed to look like single mansions. The street was widened and leveled for a trolley line in 1893, and a roughly 2000-foot rusticated limestone retaining wall was built along its north side. The district is regarded as the finest collection of its kind in Pottstown, and its uniform streetscape of late Victorian and early twentieth-century residences reflects the town's peak period of growth.