Newville Historic District

Newville is a small borough on the western bank of Big Spring Creek, about 12 miles west of Carlisle, where a village plat was laid out around Big Spring Presbyterian Church in the late 18th century. The district's 529 resources include 414 contributing buildings, mostly 19th-century houses, along with seven churches, two former schoolhouses, three social halls, two former fire stations and 17 commercial buildings. Its earliest surviving houses are log dwellings from about 1795 to 1798, though all have been altered. Stone houses of the 1820s to 1830s, such as the five-bay Georgian house at 51 East Main Street built around 1830 with quoins and flat arches, show the town's growth. The Cumberland Valley Railroad, built in 1837, shaped later development, and Newville grew into a regional center for commerce, education and religion. The district is significant for the range and survival of its architecture from the 1790s through about 1950.