Mechanicsburg Commercial Historic District

Along three blocks of Main Street in Mechanicsburg, the central business district of this Cumberland County borough is built up with closely spaced, attached buildings that abut the sidewalk. Settled in the early nineteenth century by wagon makers and mechanics serving travelers on the roads west, the borough grew after the Cumberland Valley Railroad reached it in 1837. Most of the surviving buildings are two- and three-story brick Italianate structures from the 1850s onward, many with lintels, cornices, brackets and early storefronts. The district holds 102 buildings, of which 18 are individually significant and 73 contribute, and only eleven are intrusions. Its architecture and mid-to-late nineteenth-century streetscape are regarded as well preserved, with the commercial character of the borough's most prosperous period still visible.