Roaring Spring: One Man's Paper Town

Roaring Spring takes its name from the powerful natural spring that has flowed here since before European settlement. A grist mill was drawing on that water by the seventeen sixties, but the borough as we know it was almost entirely the creation of one person: Daniel Mathias Bare, a businessman who saw in the spring's clean, steady output the ideal power source for a paper mill. In eighteen sixty-five, Bare platted the first fifty building lots.

In eighteen sixty-six, the mill began operating, the region's first paper mill. A railroad soon connected the town, pulling Roaring Spring into national commerce and anchoring what would become a small regional paper industry. The spring that started it all still flows.

A snapshot from eighteen seventy-three counts about one hundred seventy lots, fifty buildings, two mills, three churches, a company store, a schoolhouse, and one hotel, with a population of about one hundred. The borough was incorporated in eighteen eighty-eight. A pond fed by the spring, called Spring Dam, is known for its clear water and big fish.

The Roaring Spring Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-five and covers two hundred thirty-three acres, more than half of the borough. When Route Thirty-Six was bypassed around the village in nineteen fifty-seven, many merchants left the old core. The Blank Book Company and a water bottling company are still there, and about twenty-four hundred people live in town.

Roaring Spring Blank Book, a descendant operation, continues to manufacture paper here, making this one of the more remarkable examples of a small Pennsylvania borough whose founding industry simply never left.