The hollow dam at Warrior Ridge

Two miles south of Petersburg, where the Frankstown Branch of the Juniata cuts a gap through Warrior Ridge, a hollow concrete dam and a power plant were built in 1905 to 07 for the Juniata Hydro-Electric Company of Philadelphia. William H. Cushman, the company's chief engineer, designed the power house and hydraulic installation. A.G. Wood planned the auxiliary coal fired steam plant, the General Electric Company designed the electrical installation, and the Ambursen Hydraulic Construction Company designed and built the dam.

The main dam is 400 feet long and 27 feet high, reinforced concrete with one foot plank flash boards, running from the power plant on the north bank to the steep slope of the ridge on the south. An auxiliary dam 110 feet long and of the same design was added in 1907, north of the plant. Ambursen had patented the buttressed hollow core dam in 1904. The nomination says Warrior Ridge was one of the earliest covered versions of that design and drew widespread attention in the engineering press. The Engineering Record ran it on December 22, 1906, and Huntingdon's Semi-Weekly News reprinted the article on February 14, 1907 under the headline "Description of the Wonderful Hydro-Electric Plant, Warrior Ridge."

The plant had a capacity of 8,000 horsepower and contracted to supply Huntingdon and its surrounding communities, Altoona and Tyrone. The company built four houses in 1907, three bungalows of 25 by 30 feet and one double house, and, the nomination says, a small frame church in the 1910s. The 1910 census counted a superintendent, an operator and two stationary firemen living there.

Pennsylvania Hydro Electric took the complex in 1911 when Juniata Hydro could not satisfy its mortgages. Penelec bought it in 1927 and ran both hydro and steam until 1952, when the steam plant closed and the houses were sold to individual owners. The Agnes flood of 1972 wrecked turbines and other equipment, and a major portion of the plant was demolished in 1978. A 1991 National Park Service inventory of the county's engineering sites says American Hydro Power bought the plant from Penelec in 1984 and brought it back on line in 1985 as a 2.8 megawatt station, with one original turbine, a 1906 S. Morgan Smith unit repaired after Agnes, still in its chamber. In 1989 the former church, 15 by 18 feet, was being used to treat water for the company houses.

Although electricity was produced on a small scale at isolated and scattered locations throughout the county, this operation represents the first and only large scale production in the county at this time. This permitted large scale change in industrial production to the areas served by the power company.National Register of Historic Places nomination, Warrior Ridge Dam and Hydroelectric Plant (reference 90000701), 90000701, section 8, p7 · character 11,219 of the scanned text

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

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