HUNT Tower, the Switch Tower the Flood Built

HUNT Tower stands just north of the tracks at the west end of the old station platforms in Huntingdon, where Fourth and Fifth Streets meet Allegheny. The Historic American Engineering Record recorded it as HAER PA-245, compiled by Nancy Shedd and Ken Heineman with editors Gray Fitzsimons and Kenneth Rose, part of a documentation project HAER and HABS began in February 1987 whose results were published in the 1991 county inventory.

The survey describes a two-story signal tower, 30 by 20 feet, with a brick first story, a frame second story and a hipped roof, plus a one-story addition of 10 by 10 feet. Tall windows wrap around the building, some of them covered with plywood when the surveyors visited. The survey credits both the Pennsylvania Railroad and the Huntingdon and Broad Top as builders.

The survey traces the building back to the flood of 1889. It explains that the flood destroyed the partly abandoned Juniata Division of the Pennsylvania Canal, and the Pennsylvania Railroad moved its tracks out of the middle of Allegheny Street and onto the canal bed, which in turn forced the Huntingdon and Broad Top to relocate its own tracks to the north bank of the river. The survey says that relocation was responsible for the switch tower, and dates HUNT Tower to about 1900.

Conrail abandoned the tower to automation in 1985. The survey lists its owner as Huntingdon Revitalization & Development, the town's Main Street organization, which saved it from demolition and was restoring it for adaptive use. The survey's history section is the same text as the one written for the Union Depot, whose record counts the tower as one of three buildings in the station complex; the two records share one narrative.

The 1991 county inventory prints Jet Lowe's photograph of the tower as its Photo 38, on the same page as his view of the station.

This relocation of the tracks was responsible for construction of the new switch tower.Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, Hunt Tower, written data pages, HAER PA-245, Hunt Tower, data pages, report page 1, Significance (PDF p. 2) · character 1,213 of the scanned text

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

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