Thompson Grain Elevator, Rare Survivor of the Railroad Age

In eighteen eighty-five, the Thompson family built a grain elevator and coal shed complex in the village of Lemont, Centre County, paid for with insurance money after a hotel fire. The structure sat beside the Bellefonte Central Railroad. Grain flowed out; coal came in.

For decades the Thompson complex anchored the agricultural trade of central Pennsylvania, serving farmers who grew wheat and corn on the rolling land around what is now State College. Moses Thompson was himself a founder of Farmers High School, the institution that eventually became Penn State University. These wooden buildings have survived more than a century, making them rare examples of nineteenth-century agricultural infrastructure.

They stand as a quiet reminder of the railroad economy that connected Centre County to the wider world before the automobile.