Lewistown Station: The Oldest Pennsylvania Railroad Building

The building you are passing is the oldest known surviving structure ever built by the Pennsylvania Railroad, one of the most powerful corporations in American history. Constructed in eighteen forty-eight and eighteen forty-nine as a freight handling warehouse, it was in use when the railroad's arrival in Lewistown was celebrated with a banquet in eighteen forty-nine. Company officials and local dignitaries gathered to mark the moment the iron road reached this Juniata Valley community.

The Pennsylvania Railroad would go on to become known as the standard railroad of the world, a colossus stretching from New York to Chicago. This modest warehouse predates almost all of it. Later, as passenger traffic grew, the building was renovated and converted into a passenger station. It stands today as a quiet artifact of the railroad era's very beginning, older than the locomotives that made the Pennsylvania Railroad famous.