Hollidaysburg PA

Hollidaysburg is a small attractive county seat town in central Pennsylvania surrounded by the lands of scenic Blair County. It’s the kind of scenic historic town that I call a “walking town” due to residents being able to walk nearly everywhere to what they need.

There are tree-lined streets through beautiful old neighborhoods with many Victorian-era homes and earlier. Additionally, there’s the classic American Main Street lined with small shops and offices in the old central business area, along with the town square called The Diamond. There are old buildings dating from the town’s canal era heydey of the 1830s and many more fine old homes from later eras too.

One unusual feature of Hollidaysburg is the Chimney Rocks overlook that gives an overall panoramic view of the town. In the modern age of drones, anyone can create an aerial view of any town. But Hollidaysburg always had a natural view that anyone with a will to climb up to Chimney Rocks could easily have. Some of the pictures in this gallery were taken from there.

Another interesting situation in Hollidaysburg is a genuine old-fashioned steam train that runs regularly giving tourist rides. It’s called the Everett Railroad and more pictures of it can be found in its own website gallery here.

Hollidaysburg is a very old town first laid out in 1796 by the Holliday brothers from Ireland. At that time, the place was on the edge of the American frontier with plenty of Native Americans around. In fact, Adam Holliday had several children carried off during an Indian raid while they were working the fields outside of town.

Interstingly, many years later a daughter was found alive near what is known as Detroit Michigan.

At one time, Hollidaysburg was very important hub during the American canal era of the 1830s through the 1850s. It was the point where the sectional canal boats were pulled from the canal and brought over the Allegheny mountains on rails over a series of inclined planes. That was a major engineering achievement at the time, pre-railroad times.