The 1849 railroad bridge Huntingdon left behind

At the east end of Huntingdon, just south of the Penn Street road bridge, four semicircular stone arches stand over Standing Stone Creek with no rails on top of them. The top courses of stone are gone, and forsythia and small shrubs grow where the track used to be. This is the bridge the Pennsylvania Railroad built in 1848 and 1849 to carry its first single track through the county.

The nomination says contracts for the sections through Huntingdon were let in May 1848, and that regular service began the day after the first train reached the town in June 1850. Lytle's 1876 history describes the arrival: the first train of cars came in on a Thursday, five or six trucks drawn by the locomotive "Henry Clay," running slowly on a trial trip so that people had time to reach the line and watch. Africa's 1883 history adds that the papers of the day thought it wonderful progress that Philadelphia to Cincinnati could now be done in three days and six hours.

The bridge carried trains for just over forty years. In 1892 the railroad moved its main line onto the bed of the former Pennsylvania Canal, just south of the original alignment, and the old bridge was abandoned. Its replacement stands just to the south. The 1991 county engineering inventory records that the contract for the new bridge went to Brown Bros. and Sims in March 1891, that a large force of Hungarian laborers built it, and that the first trains ran over the new track in February 1892.

What remains is 110 feet long. The voussoirs and keystones of the arch rings are smooth faced, while the rest of the stonework is rock faced. The nomination, written in 1989 and drawing much of its text from Nancy Shedd's 1988 report for the Historic American Engineering Record, calls the bridge a good example of the railroad's early stone construction and notes that rail service mattered to local iron and flour industries. It was listed under the Industrial Resources of Huntingdon County multiple property nomination, and the county inventory describes it as one of the few original main line bridges of the Pennsylvania Railroad still standing. It sits about 30 feet from the road bridge and 50 feet from the later railroad bridge, each of its arches about 25 feet across.

The old Standing Stone Creek Bridge is a good example of a nineteenth century multiple span stone arch bridge built by the Pennsylvania Railroad for their right-of-way. With its good integrity it is a fine example of the early bridge construction used by the Pennsylvania Railroad.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Pennsylvania Railroad Old Bridge over Standing Stone Creek (reference 90000410), Pennsylvania Railroad Old Bridge over Standing Stone Creek, section 8 page 2 (PDF page 5) · character 5,284 of the scanned text

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

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