Woodvale's post office, assessed at $150 in 1919

On the north side of Main Street in Woodvale stands a small hipped-roof, wood-frame building that the Historic American Buildings Survey recorded in 1989 as the town's post office. The survey's history runs to three sentences. In 1919, four years after a post office was built in Robertsdale, another went up at Woodvale, and county tax assessments listed the new structure as originally valued at $150. Seventy years later it was still in use as a post office.

Woodvale was a company town. The survey was part of a larger project to document the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company towns of Robertsdale and Woodvale, undertaken by the Historic American Buildings Survey and the Historic American Engineering Record at the request of America's Industrial Heritage Project. Lola Bennett, the project historian, did the research and writing in the summer of 1989 under Alison K. Hoagland, and her work was published in 1990 as The Company Towns of the Rockhill Iron and Coal Company.

The 1992 National Register nomination for the Woodvale Historic District adds the building's shape and its name. It describes the 1919 post office as one story, wood frame, two bays wide with a hip roof, and calls it the one institutional building left in Woodvale after the town's two schools were torn down, one in the 1970s and one in the 1980s, and the company store burned in 1937. The nomination also explains why the post office does not carry the town's name: it uses the name Wood so as not to be confused with the Woodvale in Cambria County.

The Library of Congress catalog carries a slip of its own. The catalog title for the survey places the post office in Cambria County, while the survey's own data sheet, on its first page, puts it in Huntingdon County.

In 1919, four years after the post office was built in Robertsdale, another was erected at Woodvale, County tax assessments indicate that this structure was originally valued at $150. The small, hipped-roof, wood-frame structure on the north side of Main Street is still used today as a post office.Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record, Woodvale Post Office, written data pages, HABS PA-5575 data pages, page 2 · character 840 of the scanned text

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

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