Hallstead: The Town Named for the Railroad That Made It
Pennsylvania
The borough of Hallstead in Susquehanna County, Pennsylvania, sits at one of the Susquehanna River's most pronounced curves, a spot long known as the Great Bend. European settlers arrived here as early as seventeen eighty-seven. The Erie Railway built its rail yard on the riverbank in eighteen forty-eight and opened service here that same year.
The town grew around that infrastructure and for decades was called Great Bend Village, incorporating under that name in eighteen seventy-four. Then in eighteen eighty-seven the borough voted to rename itself Hallstead in honor of William F. Hallstead, president of the Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad.
It is one of the more direct examples of a community defining itself entirely by the railroad that defined it.
