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= The Roaring Spring Historic District is locally significant in the areas of architecture, industry and social history as an excellent example of a paternally founded and managed paper-mill town in central Pennsylvania, one whose architecture reflects how the growth of a hometown, family-owned industry stimulated and, in many cases, directed the development patterns and architectural character of the community.

As the first paper-mill town in Blair County, Roaring Spring played an important role in establishing a small regional paper industry.[7] Only two other paper mills have operated in the immediate region: one in Tyrone, co-founded by D. M. Bare in 1878, and the other in Williamsburg started in 1905 by steel magnate Charles Schwab.[8] The Borough of Roaring Spring and its paper mill were essentially the creation of one person, Daniel Mathias Bare (1834–1925).

As the town's 50th year history noted: "To write a detailed account of the life and activities of Daniel Mathias Bare is practically equivalent to writing the industrial, and, to a very great extent, the institutional history of Roaring Spring. From the time he located here in 1864 until the time of his death he was pre-eminently the town's greatest leader, occupying the foremost ranks of those who promoted its industrial, commercial and religious enterprises."[9] Based on Bare's leadership, a good geographical location and a plentiful supply of clean water, the town became a successful regional producer of paper and related products from 1867 onward.

Architecturally, the commercial, industrial, institutional, and residential character of the town retains an integrity that accurately conveys the developmental evolution of the community between 1821 and 1944.Before 1868, Roaring Spring was called Spang's Mill, a hamlet in Taylor Township situated around a gristmill operated by George B.

Spang.[10] The area was patented in the 1760s by white settlers attracted to the Big Spring, an eight-million-gallon-a-day limestone spring that emerges from a hillside in the center of town. At least as early as the 1760s, a gristmill was operated here by a German Dunkard named Jacob Neff and it was called Neff's Mill.

German Dunkards and Scots-Irish Presbyterians were the predominant pioneer groups in Morrisons Cove during the late 18th century. As late as the 1750s, the land around the spring had probably contained a village of Lenni Lenape Indians.[11]Ironmaking played a contributing role in Spang Mill's early growth, especially through the Civil War before the paper mill was founded.

The village stood about mid course between a large iron furnace (Martha Furnace) at McKee's Gap to the north and an iron-ore quarry to the south at Bloomfield. Teamsters driving the ore wagons often traded at the gristmill and a general store. The district's oldest known building from this pre-paper mill era is the Johannes Lower House, a log farmhouse at 912 Bloomfield St., built ca.

1808–10. Although substantially enlarged and covered with siding, the south half of the structure still contains the original house. At the time, Bloomfield Street was a country road leading through Morrisons Cove toward McKee's Gap.D. M. Bare moved with his wife to Spang's Mill in 1864 after having purchased the 90-acre (360,000 m2) "Mill Seat Tract" with his father, a farmer from Sinking Valley in Blair County, north of Altoona.

Attracted to the location because of the spring's dependable flow and superior water quality, Bare initially operated the gristmill and general store. He built the first paper mill in 1866 with two partners, John Eby and John Morrison, but a disastrous fire destroyed the wood-frame building just after its completion.

The three men rebuilt on the site almost immediately, and by 1867 were in business again, establishing a trade in low-grade paper made from rag, gunny sacking and straw. Through the rest of the 19th century, the mill evolved from a maker of manila wrapping paper and newspaper to a manufacturer of fine bond by the late 1930s.The Bares had three daughters, all of whom married men that Bare groomed to manage various aspects of the family business.

In time, all three — Dr. Abraham L. Garver, Edwin G. Bobb and Dr. William M. Eldon — became partners and/or managers in one of Bare's largely family-controlled companies. Throughout his working life, Bare retained partners in most of his business ventures, although he appears to have maintained control over these operations either through intermediaries or family members.

The paper mill was incorporated in 1907 and the Bare family retained ownership until 1946 when the business was sold to a paper company from Wisconsin.[12]Since 1867, when the mill began operation, the plant has been expanded or substantially retooled at least nine times: 1875, 1878, 1892, 1898, 1912, 1924, ca.

1946, 1951 and 1972, according to the town's centennial history. In 1873, Bare's single wood-frame building produced 1,860 lb (840 kg). of paper a day, not quite one ton. Two years later, a boiler explosion forced Bare & Co. to rebuild, converting the cotton rag mill to wood pulp production. A second paper machine was added in 1878, and by 1881 production had increased to 3 tons a day.

A third machine was added in 1892, and in 1898 the plant was completely retooled. By 1905, following the installation of a bleach-making plant and the reconstruction of the steam-power plant, output averaged nearly 26 tons a day. By 1937, production had increased to 40 tons a day and the mill employed 250 people.[13] Each time the mill expanded or retooled, older outmoded structures were demolished and new ones added, until 1951 when a major explosion destroyed many of the remaining historic buildings.D.

M. Bare's influence can be found in practically every aspect of town life: out of his general store in 1864, he developed a department store which became known as "the company store;", now Roaring Spring Department Store, in 1867, he co-sponsored the construction of the first Methodist Church; from 1868 to 1883, he served as one of the first postmasters, nominating the village's name change to Roaring Spring in 1868; he oversaw the creation of the town's first modern utilities, including the telephone system (1880), the water supply (1892), and electrical service (1892).

The paper company underwrote the cost of extending a line from Altoona to Roaring Spring where the first telephone was installed in the head office of the mill. In a desire to create more jobs in 1887, Bare co-founded the Roaring Spring Blank Book Company, which became a primary customer for his paper, and later generated electric current for residential service until the 1920s.

Bare eventually entrusted the operation of Blank Book to his son-in-law, Dr. A. L. Garver, who joined the company at its founding and became general manager by 1891. Garver is credited with building Blank Book into the world's third leading maker of accounting book and school stationery by the 1920s.[14] In the 1880s, Bare set aside land for the town's first public parks: Memorial Park at Grove Street and the Borough Park at Spang and Spring Streets.

In 1902, he founded the town's first bank, and through the 1900-1910s oversaw the brick paving of many public streets. In 1907, he co-founded the Eldon Inn with his three sons-in-law as the town's leading hotel for business travelers. Throughout his lifetime here (1863–1925), Bare is credited with playing many other informal roles to help organize and improve the community life of the town.Bare played his most substantial role in shaping the architectural character of the town through co-founding the Roaring Spring Planing Mill in 1887.

Operated as a heating coal and building supply business with a contracting service on the side, the mill is credited with constructing most of the houses and other buildings of note in Roaring Spring between 1887 and the early 1950s. While the company records have been lost, the personal records of David S.

Smaltz (1861–1935), a carpenter who worked for the contracting business are impressive. Smaltz's own accounts kept by the family in the 1960s recorded that between 1904 and 1935 he helped build 68 houses on Walnut Street, 26 houses on Roosevelt Avenue, eight houses on Church Street, and 54 houses on New Street.[15] This figure of 148 is bolstered by D.

M. Bare's account in his autobiography where he stated that 97 buildings were erected by the planing mill between 1910 and 1920.The construction policies and practices of the planing mill company were not dictated directly by Bare, but through a partnership, as most of his business operations were arranged.

Nonetheless, there appears to have been a cohesive similarity of architectural taste and purpose at work here whose basic aesthetic must have been set by Bare and his association of partners, managers and builders. Bare also may be credited with creating the town's first subdivision of 50 lots in 1865.

Given the extent and central location of his original 90-acre (360,000 m2) holding from the Mill Seat Tract, and the fact that most of the town's pre-1944 building lots are 1⁄5 acre (810 m2) to 1⁄7 acre (580 m2), Bare's ability to shape the size and extent of development in Roaring Spring was substantial.The planing mill's most active periods of development coincided with the greatest periods of expansion for the paper mill and book company.

As new jobs were created, the population grew, and with it the demand for more housing. The paper mill's periods of expansion (within the period of significance), which postdated the founding of the planing mill, were 1892, 1898, 1912, 1924, and ca. 1946.During that same general period, the town's population more than tripled from 920 to just over 3,000 between 1890 and 1940.[16]The influence of Bare and his family over the development and affairs of one town is rather remarkable for this region.

Only two comparative community models come to mind in southwestern Pennsylvania: the brick refractories towns and coal mining towns. Alexandria and Mount Union, both in neighboring Huntingdon County, were shaped in varying degrees by the refractories industry in the early 20th century. Both witnessed the construction of worker housing in the 1910s that was financed either directly by or independently of the industry.

Beyond that, however, few across the board generalizations can be made regarding the industry's architectural impact on these communities, or others like them in the region. Some brick manufacturers were indeed family-owned and operated, while many others were divisions of larger corporations. Some built whole blocks of company housing, as in Mount Union, while others only dabbled in development, allowing local builders to meet the demand, as in Alexandria.

Some housing resembled military barracks, as in the semi-detached houses of Mount Union, while others built single-family houses, as in South Alexandria.[17]The other comparable regional model is the coal company town. Here everything was built following a company engineer's formula — from street layout to house plan — and most every structure reflected a hierarchy of design.

Roaring Spring, by contrast, contains few, if any, of the coal company town's typical two-story semi-detached frame dwellings that fill the checkerboard streets of places like Colver (est. 1890s) in Cambria County or Windber (est. 1910s) in Somerset County.[18] And while Roaring Spring's patriarchal management may have desired orderly community development, it did not impose a blatantly class-structured environment on its work force.One other comparative, if exceptional, community exists in the immediate region: The borough of Kistler, was built as a model workers' town in Mifflin County by a Mount Union refractories company.

Located just over the Juniata River from Mount Union, Kistler was designed in 1916–17 by John Nolen, a noted town planner from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The president of the Mount Union Refractories hired Nolen to create a model town, apparently inspired by the Progressive Era notion that superior housing and other community amenities designed under a master plan would improve the moral character of its inhabitants.[19]But in its architecture and layout, Roaring Spring resembles neither a company town nor a model workers community.

Unlike coal company towns, Roaring Spring possesses a relatively wide variety of housing types without a hierarchical town plan, and unlike a model community like Kistler, no master plan appears at work like a template beneath the townscape. Instead, Roaring Spring's street pattern evolved episodically from a combination of natural topography, pre-existing land tracts, and the confluence of old country roads at the Big Spring.Architecturally, Roaring Spring's neighborhoods display relatively little hierarchy by income or occupation.

Admittedly, some areas, like the Hogback just south of the paper mill, were especially known as mill workers' enclaves, but overall the town lacks the strong homogeneity of worker house types and segmentation by occupational class common to coal company towns. D. M. Bare and his cohorts seemed to have envisioned Roaring Spring as a working community of middle-class homeowners plucked from the ranks of shopkeepers, professionals and skilled workers.

The relative success of this ideal may be accounted for by the large number of skilled workers required for paper and book-making. These workers, their supervisors and the office staffs earned wages high enough to become property owners over time. Indeed, one of the achievements that D. M. Bare mentioned with pride in his autobiography was the high degree of home ownership that Roaring Spring enjoyed by 1920.Although this egalitarian vision was carried out largely from a patriarchal vantage, its ideal is reflected in the general uniformity of lot sizes through the historic district.

Each lot is just large enough to accommodate a single-family home with room for a vegetable garden and garage in the rear. Most houses are sited toward the front of their lots with modest front yards and deep backyards. Earlier houses, built along the older streets like Main and Spang, follow the traditional regional pattern of being situated close to the front lot line; later houses, built after 1900, are situated slightly back.

The exceptions to this rule are the five generous house sites next to the spring on Spang Street that were set aside by Bare for his family. By local standards, these were palatial houses set on deep lots of 0.5 acres (2,000 m2) with relatively expansive wooded lawns.Unlike heavier industrial centers in the greater region, such as Johnstown and Pittsburgh, Roaring Spring's population had remained relatively homogeneous in ethnic, racial and political terms, a historical factor that reinforced the outward social cohesiveness of the community.

During the early decades of the 20th century, as the nation experienced large waves of immigration from eastern and southern Europe, the town remained primarily old-stock Protestant descendants of Germans and Scotch Irish. It also failed to experience the great northern migration of African Americans from the South looking for factory jobs after the Second World War.

Roman Catholics were the last major mainstream denomination to establish a congregation in Roaring Spring. Prior to 1969, most local Roman Catholics worshipped at St. Patrick's in Newry, an Irish-founded parish about 10 miles (16 km) away. The town has also remained true to the temperance movement as championed by D.

M. Bare from his earliest days. Under the Bare family influence, the town went dry in the 1890s and remains so today, as does all of the Morrisons Cove valley. It is also revealing that while the paper mill was family owned, local labor unions were practically nonexistent. The first union local — United Brotherhood of Pulp and Sulphite Workers (AFL) — was not organized until 1943.Most of Roaring Spring's architecture belongs to a nationally common set of styles and types influenced by the rise of the railroad after 1850.

The Pennsylvania Railroad's connection to the town in 1871 had a significant effect on this development by drawing the paper mill, and with it the village, into the mainstream of national commerce. The railroad opened national markets to the paper mill, allowing its business to expand beyond a narrow regional scope.

By the mid-19th century, as Roaring Spring was first growing, the regional peculiarities of folk architecture were gradually disappearing under the railroad's and the industrial revolution's influences. As the town grew with the paper mill, especially after the P.R.R.'s branch line opened, the new housing styles reflected national trends rather than local vernacular traditions.Roaring Spring can be compared in this regard with the only other paper-mill towns in the region: Tyrone and Williamsburg, both in Blair County.

Tyrone, which is located on the Juniata River above Altoona, was fairly well established by 1878 when D. M. Bare co-founded a paper mill there. The new worker housing built from that year forward took on the same architectural character as Roaring Spring's after 1878. Williamsburg had originated as an 1830s canal town on another branch of the Juniata northeast of Hollidaysburg.

In 1905, its community leaders persuaded former native and steel tycoon Charles Schwab to build a large paper mill. Williamsburg's post-1905 development thereafter came to resemble Roaring Spring's in style and type. The construction of comfortable single-family houses became quite common, especially Foursquares and large Gable Front types.

These two examples suggest that the region's paper industry offered skilled workers' wages sufficient to support home ownership, and that local builders' housing styles in central Pennsylvania were already homogeneous by the 1870s.One of the exceptions to this national trend is the Mennonite meeting house, originally built for the Methodist Episcopal congregation in 1867.

The term "meeting house" is appropriate for this building, which bears none of the vaguely Gothic effects of most post-Civil War American churches. Rather, it is a regional throwback — an unadorned house-like structure common to early 19th century central Pennsylvania when new congregations often first met in private homes before building simple meeting houses as their first church.

The Methodists were the first organized denomination (1802) in Roaring Spring, and this building was the town's first house of worship. The builder, the Rev. John A. J. Williams (1833–1909), was a Methodist minister by calling and a carpenter by trade, who moved to Roaring Spring after the Civil War.

One of the borough's early leading citizens, he is credited with building many pre-1887 structures in Roaring Spring before the Roaring Spring Planing Mill's founding, including a number of houses on the south side of E. Main Street between Spang and Poplar Streets.Master builders and carpenters like Williams, guided by patrons like D.H.

Bare who also helped underwrite the Methodist church, determined the look of Roaring Spring's architecture rather than professional architects. The builders, in most cases, were not design innovators but craftsmen who adapted plans from myriad national sources such as catalogs, pattern books, magazines, mail-order services, lumberyard fliers, and trade literature.

While pattern books had been available to American builders as early as the 18th century, mail-order design services became nationally common by the 1880s. Along with the influence of the railroad and mass-circulation magazines, all of these homogenizing influences contributed to the decline of regional vernacular architecture and the spread of nationally accepted styles.

Significantly, many of these sources targeted conservative markets, promoting traditional designs that appealed to small-town America. As one example of this phenomenon, many of the houses in Roaring Spring built around the start of the 20th century appear to be older Victorian types, such as many Gothic Revivals models of the era which are really double-pile Georgian types in plan.

Presumably, this conservative impulse was of small concern to the first owners who paid little attention to "high style" design trends. What most homeowners looked for in a house was comfort, serviceability, and an acceptable level of appeal conforming with their community's taste.Quite often, the local distributor of trade literature and new construction trends in a small town was the neighborhood building supply center.

In Roaring Spring, as in many regional towns and cities, the planing mill fulfilled that function. As a result, the importance of planing mills like Roaring Spring's in shaping the architectural character of communities in this region cannot be overstated. These operations supported builders by providing not only design plans and new ideas, but finished lumber, paint, roofing materials, and pre-fabricated components like windows, doors and molding for thousands of construction projects throughout the region.

As the critical link in the local building industry, they have helped set the style for communities throughout central Pennsylvania from the beginning of the railroad era in the 1850s to the present.In summary, Roaring Spring stands as an excellent example of a paternally founded and managed paper-mill town in central Pennsylvania, one whose buildings reflect how the growth of a hometown family-owned industry stimulated and, in many cases, directed the development patterns and architectural character of the community.

Architecturally, the commercial, industrial, institutional, and residential character of Roaring Spring town retains an integrity that accurately conveys the developmental evolution of the community between 1821 and 1944. The themes of Industry, Architecture and Social History, make Roaring Spring an excellent example of a locally significant historic district.