Hollidaysburg: Where Canal Met Mountain Railroad

The small borough of Hollidaysburg was named for brothers Adam and William Holliday, Irish immigrants who laid out the settlement in seventeen ninety-six. For most of its early years it was a quiet crossroads, but in the early eighteen thirties everything changed when the Juniata Division of the Pennsylvania Canal reached town. Hollidaysburg became the pivot point of a remarkable engineering system: boats traveling the canal from the east pulled up here, their cargo transferred to the Allegheny Portage Railroad, which hauled freight and passengers up and over the mountain on a series of inclined planes powered by stationary steam engines.

From eighteen thirty-four to eighteen fifty-four, Hollidaysburg was literally where the water highway ended and the mountain railway began. When Blair County was organized in eighteen forty-six, Hollidaysburg became the county seat, a title it still holds today.