Lewis Smalley's stone house at the mouth of Aughwick

On Route 103, two miles east of US 522 where Aughwick Creek meets the Juniata River, stands a two and a half story house of native stone that the nomination calls one of the oldest in Huntingdon County. It measures thirty feet by twenty five, three bays wide, with a tin gable roof and a brick chimney inside the north gable end. There are four rooms, two up and two down, and a wide hallway at the south end. The feature the form singles out is the corner fireplaces, stone arched and still working. The interior walls are wood lath with hair mortar, the floors unfinished hemlock, the cellar and attic beams hand hewn, and the exterior doors solid plank with their original hardware.

The ground was part of a 150 acre tract deeded to Charles Boyle at the junction of the creek and the river; the 1768 tax records show him with 150 acres, 15 of them cleared. Lewis Smalley enlisted on January 20, 1778 as a private under Captain John Hamilton and served under several captains in the 7th Battalion of the Cumberland militia until May 1781. He bought the Boyle property in 1797 and built his home. Africa's 1883 county history lists him as constable of Shirley Township in 1808 and places the Lewis Smalley tracts in the Aughwick Valley, down around what is now Aughwick Mills.

The stone bank barn measures forty five by ninety feet. Its ground level stables can hold fifty head, a granary sits on the threshing floor level, the windows are louvered with limestone slab sills, and the beams, joists and double notched rafters are hand hewn, mortised and pegged. During the Civil War, the nomination says, Union cavalry was quartered here, and the soldiers carved their names into the barn alongside those of earlier owners. One inscription reads George W. Briggs, Capt. 7th Infantry Militia.

Also on the property are a wooden henhouse, a hogpen, a corncrib and a springhouse. The house has gained a full length hipped roof porch on the front and lost one gable end doorway, sealed over; plumbing, electricity and an oil fired furnace are the only interior changes. The homestead was entered in the National Register on November 14, 1978 for architecture and for exploration and settlement, on 30.08 acres whose boundary runs along the river bank for 875 feet back to its starting point.

Because of its location, it was thought to be of vast importance in the protection of the Pennsylvania Railroad which was feared to be vulnerable to attack by raiding Confederate troops who had penetrated as far north as McConnellsburg. Therefore, Union Cavalry was stationed and quartered on this site and many inscriptions of the soldiers resident here are to found on the barn.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Lewis Smalley Homestead (reference 78003088), 78003088, section 8, p3 · character 5,804 of the scanned text

Checked 2026-09-05 · National Register of Historic Places nomination, read in full

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