Highspire: Canal Town on the Susquehanna

Highspire was laid out in eighteen fourteen by two German settlers, recorded as Barnes and Doughterman, on the east bank of the Susquehanna River. The name may come from a village called Spire in their homeland, though others say it refers to a tall church spire visible from the river.

Its position on the Pennsylvania Canal made Highspire a natural stop for commerce. Distillers, loggers, candy makers, and potato chip producers all set up here, moving goods along the canal and river. Boat building, knitting, and milling were part of the mix too. Later an electric trolley connected the borough to the steel works at Steelton and to Harrisburg, giving workers a daily commute that tied this small river community into the industrial economy of the capital region.

Highspire was incorporated as a borough in eighteen sixty-seven. It sits today between Harrisburg and Middletown, a compact Susquehanna River borough that still carries the shape its German founders gave it more than two hundred years ago. Pennsylvania Route two thirty runs through the borough, about seven miles northwest through Steelton to Harrisburg and about three miles southeast to Middletown. Highspire High School was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety, and the twenty twenty census counted two thousand seven hundred forty-one residents.