Old Conemaugh Borough Historic District

Along the crescent-shaped Railroad Street, on the slope above the old Pennsylvania Mainline Canal basin in Johnstown, sits a working-class neighborhood of plank and balloon-frame houses built between about 1850 and 1934. The district grew from a canal settlement opened in 1831 and later housed mill workers from the Gautier Division of the Cambria Iron Company, which manufactured wire from 1878. Company-built double houses on Gautier and Chapin Streets, built after 1878 for mill workers, remain largely intact. The district holds Johnstown's oldest neighborhood business strip, anchored by the American House of 1832, a Federal-style canal hotel. Its churches and schools include St. Joseph's German Catholic Church of 1868, which survived the 1889 flood. Several Victorian mansions, including Second Empire and Queen Anne houses, stand among the closely packed vernacular homes. The district's architecture is valued for its unusually complete mid-to-late nineteenth-century character.