The lockkeeper's house that turned its back on Alexandria's grid

At the southeast corner of Hartslog Street and Shelton Avenue stands a two-story frame house that does not line up with the rest of Alexandria. The Historic American Buildings Survey, recording it in the summer of 1988 as HABS PA-5406, says it is the only building in town set at an angle to the street grid, turned to front the canal path that once ran past its door. The survey calls it the only lockkeeper's house built in Alexandria, and its tender was responsible for two locks, No. 49 and No. 50, one on each side of Hartslog Street.

The survey dates the house to about 1832. The chain of title it traced, which it calls incomplete, begins with a deed of December 30, 1835, from Robert McClelland to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and the report concludes the canal company built the house after taking the land. The overview report for the same project is less sure: it allows that McClelland may have built the house and had it moved, and says only that the commonwealth took the lot from him for a lock house in 1835. A 1991 National Park Service inventory of the county's engineering sites reads the 1835 deed as conveying a lot that already had a house on it.

Census returns name some of the tenders who lived here rent free: W. Mealy, 53, in 1850; Thomas Madow, 17, in 1860; and Perry Robinson, 58, in 1870. The canal through Alexandria closed in 1875, and on December 31 of that year the Pennsylvania Canal Company deeded the property to William P. Robison. In 1890 it passed to William M. Phillips, a grain buyer and commission merchant from York whom the survey describes as a leading merchant in the county by 1868.

By 1988 a front door had been cut into the west side so the house faced Hartslog Street instead of the canal, and it had been wrapped with a one-story porch and enlarged with a two-story shed and a garage. The survey rated its fabric fair. The 1991 inventory names it, substantially altered, among the standing canal remains its survey recorded in the county, alongside the guard lock, its feeder and remnants of the Raystown feeder dam below Huntingdon. Warren and Rebecca Itinger had owned it since April 25, 1950.

The house was undoubtedly erected by the Pennsylvania Canal Company after it obtained deed to the land in 1835, gable-front oriented to accommodate the canal's diagonal alignment through Alexandria. No other building in town violates the rectangular town grid.Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, Pennsylvania Canal Lockkeeper's House, written data pages, HABS PA-5406 data pages, p. 3 (Historical Context) · character 4,285 of the scanned text

Checked 2026-09-05 · Library of Congress survey record, read in full

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