The John Porter house at Bridge and Main

About 90 feet west of the corner of Bridge and Main streets in Alexandria, on the south side of Main with the Juniata River at the back of the lot, stands a two-story brick house that the Historic American Buildings Survey recorded in 1988 as the John Porter House. The survey dated it to about 1822 to 1824 and described a five-bay, L-plan dwelling with a center hall, its Federal styling concentrated at the front door: a six-panel wood door under a decorated fanlight, with three-light sidelights to either side. The deed came on April 30, 1824, from Conrad Bucher to John and Maria Porter. Africa's 1883 history, in its appended list of county marriages, records John Porter marrying a daughter of Conrad Bucher of Alexandria.

The survey called Porter one of the most successful of Alexandria's merchants. Africa records the store of Bucher & Porter, followed by John Porter, and names Bucher & Porter among the owners of the village's four warehouses in the best period of the canal. He served as postmaster, and Africa's roll of the Alexandria school board shows him as secretary from 1857 to 1864. In the Alexandria Presbyterian Church he sat on the first session of elders of the united congregations of Hart's Log and Alexandria, and was clerk of session for fifty-six years. Elected superintendent of the Sabbath school in 1825, he held the post until a few Sabbaths before his death in the spring of 1881.

The survey adds, on the authority of the Huntingdon County Historical Society, that the house was the birthplace of his son Thomas Conrad Porter, a botanist for whom a tree and a flower were named.

His executors conveyed the house to Salome Porter on December 13, 1897, and it was still a single-family home when the survey came. Paired interior chimneys rise through a parapet at each gable end, and between the flues on the east end three narrow attic windows form a modest Palladian group: an arched four-light window flanked by two three-light windows.

The owner of this house throughout the canal era, John Porter, was a locally eminent man. He was director of the Alexandria school in 1848, and secretary of the school board from 1857-64. An elder of the Presbyterian Church in its early years, he was also clerk of the Presbyterian sessions for fifty-six years (Africa, 430).Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, John Porter House, written data pages, HABS PA-5397 data pages, report page 2 (PDF page 3) · character 3,345 of the scanned text

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

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