Juniata township, Penn township, Huntingdon borough

Damming The Raystown Branch

Raystown Lake, April 2015.Ron Shawley, 2015. CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 3.0

Long before the Army engineers built their high-level dam on the Raystown Branch, a company led by Huntingdon men put up a private power dam there. A 1991 National Park Service inventory of the county's industrial sites says that plant was demolished in the early 1970s for construction of the high-level dam.

In April 1906 the Democratic Watchman reported that the Raystown Water Power company, whose leading representatives were J. R., W. B. and G. E. Simpson of Huntingdon, had bought or secured options on two-thirds of the properties along the branch from the Corbin school house near Huntingdon some ten miles upstream. A year later the paper said options worth $50,000 had been taken up on lands in Juniata and Penn townships, and a gang of men was putting down test holes to find a location for the first dam.

In June 1908 an order went out for 60,000 barrels of cement for the new power dam a few miles above Huntingdon, 600 carloads in all. By August 1909 eighty foreign workers were engaged in the work, forty more had just been brought from Philadelphia, and the Raystown Inn had more than fifty boarders. The Centre Democrat said the dam was expected to supply the power for the street car line from Lewistown to Bellefonte. In November 1910 a twenty-eight horse team was hauling the heaviest machinery to the site, four days to a trip.

The National Register study of the county's industries describes the result as a different type of concrete hydropower dam, concrete steps with more rise than run, with a coal-fired steam plant to supplement its water-powered turbines. It dates the company to 1908, though its name was in the papers by 1906, and says the plant, completed in 1912, was joined to the growing network of power lines serving central Pennsylvania.

A Harrisburg Telegraph report, reprinted in a Honesdale paper on December 6, 1911, said that since the Austin disaster every large dam in the state was being visited by members of the commission and engineers, and that the Raystown dam in Huntingdon County was among those recently inspected.

Checked and confirmed. Confirmed 2026-10-31 against the sources listed: every factual sentence was tied to a word-for-word passage in its source. Where sources disagreed on a number, the number was left out.

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