The Moxham Historic District is a national

historic district A historic district or heritage district is a section of a city which contains older buildings considered valuable for historical or architectural reasons. In some countries or jurisdictions, historic districts receive legal protection from c ...

that is located in Johnstown in

Cambria County, Pennsylvania Cambria County is a county in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. As of the 2020 census, the population was 133,472. Its county seat is Ebensburg. The county was created on March 26, 1804, from parts of Bedford, Huntingdon, and Somerset Countie ...

. Moxham was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the United States federal government's official list of districts, sites, buildings, structures and objects deemed worthy of preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic v ...

in 1999.

History and architectural features

This district includes 330 contributing buildings that are located in a predominantly residential area in southern Johnstown. There are 315 contributing dwellings, seventeen former

carriage house A carriage house, also called a remise or coach house, is an outbuilding which was originally built to house horse-drawn carriages and the related tack. In Great Britain the farm building was called a cart shed. These typically were open f ...

/horse barns, twenty-one commercial buildings, ten churches, and one former school. The district includes five contributing buildings that date prior to the

Johnstown Flood The Johnstown Flood (locally, the Great Flood of 1889) occurred on Friday, May 31, 1889, after the catastrophic failure of the South Fork Dam, located on the south fork of the Little Conemaugh River, upstream of the town of Johnstown, Pennsylv ...

, but the majority date from 1890 to 1930. The dwellings include notable examples of popular architectural styles including

Bungalow/craftsman In the United States, the National Register of Historic Places classifies its listings by various types of architecture. Listed properties often are given one or more of 40 standard architectural style classifications that appear in the National ...

Colonial Revival The Colonial Revival architectural style seeks to revive elements of American colonial architecture. The beginnings of the Colonial Revival style are often attributed to the Centennial Exhibition of 1876, which reawakened Americans to the archi ...

, and

American Foursquare The American Foursquare or American Four Square is an American house style popular from the mid-1890s to the late 1930s. A reaction to the ornate and mass-produced elements of the Victorian architecture, Victorian and other Revival styles popul ...

. Notable non-residential buildings include St. Patrick's Catholic Church (1905), the former Calvary Methodist Church (1894), Allegheny Wesleyan Methodist Church (1898), Grove Avenue Methodist Church (1902), Second Presbyterian Church (1914), and the former Cypress Avenue School (1900). ''Note:'' This includes The Moxham district is typical of nineteenth-century,

western Pennsylvania Western Pennsylvania is a region in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, covering the western third of the state. Pittsburgh is the region's principal city, with a metropolitan area population of about 2.4 million people, and serves as its economic ...

industrial communities, in this instance growing around the Johnston Steel Street Rail Company. The district was designed for a variety of social levels, whereas most nearby neighborhoods such as Cambria City, Minersville, and Old Conemaugh were created strictly for

blue-collar worker A blue-collar worker is a working class person who performs manual labor. Blue-collar work may involve skilled or unskilled labor. The type of work may involving manufacturing, warehousing, mining, excavation, electricity generation and powe ...

s. Moxham was built in a relatively flood-free area, though apparently more by luck than by planning, and experienced much of its growth after the 1889 Johnstown Flood. Moxham was listed on the

in 1999.

References

{{National Register of Historic Places in Pennsylvania Historic districts on the National Register of Historic Places in Pennsylvania Colonial Revival architecture in Pennsylvania Historic districts in Cambria County, Pennsylvania National Register of Historic Places in Cambria County, Pennsylvania Bungalow architecture in Pennsylvania American Craftsman architecture in Pennsylvania American Foursquare architecture