Marklesburg: a wagon stop town on the Bedford Road

Marklesburg runs for a little over a third of a mile along both sides of Route 26 in Woodcock Valley, between Tussey Mountain and Terrace Mountain, twelve miles southwest of Huntingdon. The National Register district takes in 58 contributing buildings, three that do not contribute, and one site, Union Cemetery.

Jacob Cresswell surveyed the town in the summer of 1844 on land of David Brumbaugh and Matthew Garner, and it was named for General Joseph Markle, the Whig candidate for governor of Pennsylvania that year. Africa's 1883 history names Jacob Skyles as builder of the first house in 1844, and Frederick and Adam Garner the second and third. Fifty five of the buildings in the district went up between about 1845 and about 1870.

From 1844 to 1855 the village was a market town and wagon stop on the road to Bedford. In 1855 the Huntingdon and Broad Top Railroad came through the valley, with Marklesburg Station half a mile east of town; Africa records trains running as far as Marklesburg from August 13 of that year. Africa wrote that over 150,000 tons of iron ore had been shipped from Marklesburg and Grafton stations in the eighteen years before 1883, mainly to the Cambria Iron Company of Johnstown and to the Grove Brothers' furnace at Danville. The scales that weighed the valley's industrial and farm products for the railroad stood on Bedford Road, as Route 26 is known locally, in front of the Zeigler Hotel.

By 1876 the town had three stores, a carriage factory, two blacksmith shops, a harness shop, two cobbler shops, three cabinet and joiner shops, a cooper, a gunsmith and two hotels. The residents petitioned for a borough charter in 1873. The Methodist congregation, organized in 1848, dedicated its church in 1852; St. Matthew's Lutheran, organized in 1804, dedicated its present building on July 30, 1871. When the opening of Raystown Lake in 1972 displaced the James Creek Church of the Brethren, that congregation bought the old Methodist church and was still meeting there in 1995.

The brick school at the south end of town, built about 1870, was used as a school until 1952; the borough bought it in 1954, and in 1995 it held the borough offices and the James Creek post office. Its bricks were fired in a kiln on the Beaver property in the village.

the said village contains a collection of houses collocated after a regular plan in regard to streets and lanes.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Marklesburg Historic District (reference 96000084), The 1873 incorporation petition, quoted in the National Register nomination, Marklesburg Historic District, section 8 page 2 (PDF page 7) · character 16,276 of the scanned text

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

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