The Three-Arch Bridge over Stone Creek

Where the Pennsylvania Railroad's main line crosses Stone Creek at the eastern end of Huntingdon borough, south of Penn Street between First and Second Streets, a three-span stone arch bridge carried its first trains in February 1892. The Historic American Engineering Record documented it as Stone Creek Bridge II, HAER PA-247, at Conrail marker 201.88, compiled by Nancy Shedd and Ken Heineman with editors Gray Fitzsimons and Kenneth Rose. The record came out of a documentation project HAER and the Historic American Buildings Survey began in southwestern Pennsylvania in February 1987, and the county results were published in 1991.

The survey measures the bridge at 132 feet, three spans of rough-faced stone. It was built in 1891 and 1892 when the railroad moved its tracks through town from Allegheny Street to the bed of the defunct Pennsylvania Canal, and it replaced a stone arch bridge of 1849 just upstream, recorded separately as Stone Creek Bridge I. The contract went to Brown Brothers and Sims in March 1891, and the survey says the contractors used a large force of Hungarian laborers to finish the work. The survey describes a 12 foot extension of reinforced concrete covering the stonework on the north side, and it cites railroad records for a widening of the bridge in 1948 by a concrete section added to that side. A builder's plaque on the south face is no longer legible.

The survey drew on Conrail's list of undergrade and overhead structures, the Huntingdon County Historical Society's photograph collection, the 1891 Sanborn map, and two issues of the Huntingdon Semi-Weekly News, 19 March 1891 and 25 January 1892. Its owner in the survey was Conrail, and its use was still railroad bridge. An addendum sheet holds xerographic copies of color transparencies.

The National Register nomination for the older bridge, prepared in 1989, adds the earlier chapter: the Pennsylvania Railroad let the contracts for its sections through Huntingdon in May 1848, the first train reached Huntingdon on June 5, 1850, and the four-arch bridge of 1848 and 1849 was abandoned in 1892 when the main line moved to the canal bed. The 1991 county inventory measures the old bridge's four semicircular arches at about 25 feet each.

The contract for building this bridge was awarded in March 1891 to Brown Bros. and Sims, who used a large force of Hungarian laborers to complete the work. The first trains ran over the new track in February 1892.Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, Stone Creek Bridge II, written data pages, HAER PA-247, Stone Creek Bridge II, data pages, report page 2 (PDF p. 3) · character 2,790 of the scanned text

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

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