The valley before the town
Most towns in central Pennsylvania grew slowly around a crossroads, a mill or a river crossing. Altoona did not. The Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) report on the city, prepared for the National Park Service and held by the Library of Congress, describes the Logan Valley in 1849 as mostly farmland and woods. Its summary is blunt: the railroad did not come to Altoona; the railroad built it.
The valley was not untouched by traffic, though. The state-built Pennsylvania Main Line Canal crossed its southern end, and that was where canal boats began their trip over the Allegheny summit on the cars of the Allegheny Portage Railroad. The Portage Railroad page explains that system. What matters here is that the valley sat at the foot of the hardest part of any route across the state: the climb up the Allegheny Front.
A decision made in Philadelphia
The Pennsylvania Railroad was chartered by the Pennsylvania Assembly in 1846. According to the HABS report, Philadelphia merchants pressed for it because they feared Baltimore would capture the trade of the west: the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad had been given permission that same year to build a line to Pittsburgh, a permission Philadelphia interests got revoked in 1847. The new company's chief engineer, J. Edgar Thomson, was told to survey the best route from Harrisburg to Pittsburgh.
On Thomson's recommendation the board made three linked decisions. The line would run through the Logan Valley. The state's Portage Railroad would serve as a temporary way over the mountains until the company could build its own. And the company's main shop complex would be placed in the valley. The report gives two reasons for the shops: the extra "helper" locomotives needed to get trains over the mountain had to be kept close to the grade, and a central site could maintain and repair equipment for the whole line.
A shop complex needed workers, and workers needed somewhere to live. So in 1849 the railroad's engineers laid out a town and gave it a name.
Laying out the town
The land came from a single farm. HABS records that an agent was sent from Philadelphia to buy the site in the name of Archibald Wright, a Philadelphia salt merchant, and that much of it soon passed to his son, John A. Wright, an early backer of the railroad's charter and one of its first directors. The David and Susannah Robeson farm, 224 acres, became the core of the town.
The plan was a grid split in two by the railroad. A triangular tract of about thirty-five acres between the tracks was given to the company for its shops, and the rest was sold as town lots, so from the first day there was an East Altoona and a West Altoona on either side of the works. The main line ran along what is now 10th Avenue, and the branch to Hollidaysburg angled away along what is now 9th Avenue. Because the streets on each side followed their own line of track, the two halves of the grid do not run parallel to each other.
Two details from the report show how improvised the plan was. The first streets and avenues were given women's names, said to be those of the surveying engineers' sweethearts; they were replaced with numbers in 1869. And the neighbouring farmers, seeing what had happened to the Robeson land, laid out towns of their own: Greensburg to the north and Loudonsville to the south. Their street plans did not match Wright's, which is why some avenues jog sideways where they cross the old boundaries.
Where the name came from
Nobody knows for certain why the town is called Altoona, and the sources this site relies on do not settle it. The HABS report sets out the competing stories without choosing between them:
- Thomson's choice. The name is said to have been given in 1849 by J. Edgar Thomson. An assistant engineer later claimed he had suggested the spelling "Altona" instead, arguing that words with a double "o" sounded undignified, and that Thomson would not change his plan.
- A Cherokee word. Some accounts link the name to "Allatoona", described as a Cherokee word meaning "high land of great worth". Thomson had worked on a Georgia railroad before joining the Pennsylvania, and one version instead credits Archibald Wright, who had spent time in Georgia. The report calls this the most popular explanation.
- A European railway town. Another source cited in the report claims the name came from an important railway centre near Hamburg.
This site repeats these as stories, not facts. None of the documents behind this page settles the question, and nobody has gone looking for a firmer answer since they were checked on 2026-10-26.
The line arrives
The railroad's first repair facility in Altoona opened in 1850, the same year its line from Harrisburg reached the town, according to the background essay for the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission (PHMC) marker on the shops. The essay for the state marker titled "Altoona" puts the completion of the 132-mile eastern section, from Harrisburg through Lewistown and the Juniata River valley, in late 1850.
For the next few years Altoona was the end of the company's own track. West of it, traffic was handed over to the state's Portage Railroad, which hauled cars up and down the mountain on inclined planes. Thomson disliked the arrangement, and the Horseshoe Curve page tells how he won the money to replace it. The company's own line over the mountain, with the curve, opened on February 15, 1854, a date the National Park Service also gives.
The railroad also gave the new town its grandest building. HABS describes the Logan House, a four-storey brick hotel the company built and leased to a manager, opened in 1855 beside the station. It became known well beyond Altoona as the site of the Loyal War Governors' Conference on September 24, 1862, when governors of Northern states met to declare their allegiance to the Union. By 1931 the company judged the building worn out, and it was demolished.
From borough to city
By the time the through line opened, Altoona had about 2,000 residents, and on February 6, 1854 it was incorporated as a borough. Growth after that followed the shops. The census table in the HABS report shows how fast:
| Year | Population |
|---|---|
| 1860 | 3,510 |
| 1870 | 10,618 |
| 1880 | 19,710 |
| 1890 | 30,337 |
| 1900 | 38,973 |
| 1920 | 60,331 |
| 1930 (peak) | 82,054 |
Altoona was chartered as a city in 1868. The government and civic history page follows the changes in its form of government after that, and the recent census figures.
The company's role in the town was real but limited, and HABS is careful about it. The railroad built a few houses for its officials and at most eleven double houses for workers, then sold the worker houses to the families living in them in 1859. Most of the town was built privately, lot by lot, by people who came for railroad jobs or for the trade those jobs created. The company backed some civic projects, such as a library, a hospital and loans toward the water supply, mostly where it had a direct interest of its own.
Reading the plan today
Worked example
This is an illustration of how to use the history above, not a description of any particular property. Suppose someone is looking at a street map of central Altoona and wants to make sense of it.
- The band of railroad land running through the middle of the city follows the original shop tract and the main line. The neighbourhoods on either side grew up as the East Side and the West Side.
- Numbered streets and avenues date from the 1869 renaming. Older documents that use women's names for streets are describing the same grid.
- Where an avenue shifts sideways at a block boundary, it may mark the edge between the Robeson tract and one of the neighbouring farm plats, as the HABS report describes for Greensburg and Loudonsville.
The town plan is the most lasting trace of the 1849 decision. The shops have shrunk and the hotel is gone, but the grid the railroad's engineers drew still shapes how Altoona is laid out.
The story continues: The Pennsylvania Railroad shops at Altoona