Roaring Spring Historic District

Roaring Spring is a borough in southern Blair County, Pennsylvania, whose historic district centers on a paper mill founded in 1866-1867 beside the Big Spring, a limestone spring that once produced about eight million gallons a day. The town grew from a grist-mill hamlet into a paper-mill community, and its population rose from about 920 in 1890 to over 3,000 by 1940. Daniel Mathias Bare, who located here in 1864, led the paper mill, laid out the first 50 lots in 1865, and co-founded the Roaring Spring Planing Mill in 1887. The planing mill is credited with building most of the town's notable houses and commercial buildings from 1887 into the early 1950s. Most homes are two-story frame houses on narrow, deep lots from the 1890s to 1930s, in styles ranging from Queen Anne and Gothic Revival to Colonial Revival and Bungalow. The district is considered significant for its architecture, its industrial history and its social history, particularly its middle-class homeownership and lack of company-town hierarchy.