Lemont Historic District

Lemont is a village at the southwestern foot of Nittany Mountain, divided by Spring Creek, with a street plan laid out by Moses Thompson in 1870. Its location at the crossroads of four early Centre County roads made it a transportation and commercial center. The district contains eighty-one principal structures and thirty-three outbuildings, most built in the second half of the nineteenth century. Victorian vernacular houses with steep cross gables predominate, alongside Georgian folk houses from earlier decades and brick cube houses from the early twentieth century. Notable buildings include the Thompson and Company Bank Building of 1868, the Dr. J.Y. Dale House of 1871, which was enlarged in the Queen Anne and Eastlake modes, and the John I. Thompson, Jr., House, remodeled in the 1880s in the Neo-Colonial mode. The village is valued as a well-preserved example of a late nineteenth century roadside village whose layout reflects the railway and highway traffic that shaped it.