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Local Area Info: Roaring Spring, Pennsylvania

Roaring Spring was established around the Big Spring in Morrison's Cove, a clean and dependable water source vital to the operation of a paper mill. Prior to 1866, when the first paper mill was built, Roaring Spring had been a grist mill hamlet with a country store at the intersection of two rural roads that lead to the mill near the spring. A grist mill, powered by the spring water, had operated at that location since at least the 1760s. After 1867, as the paper mill expanded, surrounding tracts of land were acquired to accommodate housing development for new workers. The formalization of a town plan, however, never occurred. As a result, the seemingly random street pattern of the historic district is the product of hilly topography, a small network of pre-existing country roads that converged near the Big Spring, and the property lines of adjacent tracts that were acquired through the years for community expansion. The arterial streets of the district are now East Main, West Main, Spang and Bloomfield, each of which leads out of the borough to surrounding townships. Two of these streets — Spang and East Main — meet with Church Street at the district's main intersection called "Five Points." The boundaries of the district essentially include those portions of Roaring Spring Borough which had been laid out for development by the early 1920s. This area encompasses 233 acres (0.94 km2) or 55 percent of the borough's area of 421 acres (1.70 km2). Since the district's period of significance extends to 1944, most of those buildings erected after the 1920s were built as infill within the areas already subdivided by the 1920s. In the early 1960s, the Borough began to annex sections of adjacent Taylor Township, especially to the east around the then new Rt. 36 Bypass.

Daniel Mathias (D. M.) Bare laid out Roaring Spring's first 50 building lots in 1865 after he and two partners decided to locate the region's first paper mill near the spring. These lots were located within and around the so-called village "triangle" defined by West Main, Spang, and East Main Streets. By 1873, the borough contained about 170 lots and 50 buildings, which included the paper and grist mills, three churches, a company store, a schoolhouse, and one hotel. The population stood at about 100. The triangle remained the industrial, commercial and retailing core of the town until 1957 when the bypass of Main Street, PA Rt. 36, was built to the east of town through Taylor Township. As is true of many American small towns, many village merchants along with new businesses have since relocated to the new highway. The village core retains only a few shops and professional offices, but still holds the Roaring Spring Blank Book Company and Roaring Spring Water Bottling Company, all of the historic church buildings, the public library(formerly the Eldon Inn), the borough building, the post office(earlier moved from farther up East Main St.). The elementary school (former junior-senior high school)was demolished in 2010.

The Roaring Spring Historic District is located within the Borough of Roaring Spring, a paper-mill town of about 2,600 established in the late 1860s in southern Blair County, south-central Pennsylvania. Roaring Spring is situated within the northwest quadrant of a long bowl-like valley known as Morrisons Cove, one of dozens of long but broad valleys in Pennsylvania's Ridge and Valley region. The town developed just southeast of a natural pass into the valley called McKee's Gap where an important iron smelting business (Martha Furnace) operated through the mid 19th century. The site of Roaring Spring is moderately hilly, drained by Cabbage and Halter Creeks. The most prominent natural feature is the Big Spring, or Roaring Spring, a large natural limestone spring so-called because of the great noise its eight-million-gallon-a-day stream once made rushing out of the hillside near the village center. Roaring Spring is overwhelmingly residential (91 percent) in scale, but also includes churches, stops, professional offices, a municipal building, parks, a cemetery, a book factory complex, and a former railroad station. Most houses are two-story, wood-frame single-family buildings situated on lots of 1?5 acre (810 m2) to 1?7 acre (580 m2). The largest segment of the building stock between 1865 and 1944 was constructed between the 1890s and 1930s. Architecturally, the district contains a variety of late 19th to early 20th century styles and vernacular building types, including Gothic Revival, Queen Anne, Colonial Revival, Bungalow, Foursquare, Gable Fronts, Gable Fronts & Wings, I Houses, and double-pile Georgian types. Ninety (90) percent of the district's 643 properties is rated as contributing. The remaining 10 percent consists of buildings less than 50 years old (constructed after 1944) or older buildings whose architectural integrity has been lost through inappropriate alterations. Overall, most alterations, such as inappropriate replacement of windows, doors and porch posts, are reversible if desired.