Take our Historic Walking Tour!
Mifflinburg began as a small settlement to support the surrounding farms. Laid out as two villages, Youngmanstown (1792) to the west and Greenville (1797) to the east, they grew together and were
incorporated as Mifflinburg in 1827. Businesses varied from blacksmiths to clockmakers, from tanneries to feed mills. A new industry was introduced in 1855: carriage manufacturing. Buggy making helped to shape the growth of the town and its architecture over the next 90 years.
Have fun taking our self-guided Walking Tour of Historic Mifflinburg.
Chestnut Street Looking West - Circa 1920. The Young Mansion is on the left. The original Mifflinburg
Bank & Trust is beside it.
Chestnut Street Looking East - Circa 1930. Reed’s Drugstore on the southwest corner was a popular
place for ice cream and soda.
Above, Circa 1915 - Clark Lance (seated left), used a bobsled to convey goods from the railroad station. The Hopp Carriage Company at the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets is at left. The building with the stripe above the second floor was Sankey Hall. The auditorium and stage were on the second floor, where traveling companies as well as local bands and actors performed.
The Mifflinburg Hotel/Scarlet D Tavern (264 Chestnut St.) was originally the site of Stitzer Inn built in 1829. The original structure was replaced in 1858 and was known successively as the Deckard Hotel, the Union Hotel, and then the Hotel Hopp.
2 - 275 CHESTNUT STREET
275 Chestnut St. is the Ritter House. Enoch Miller, one of the town’s most prominent builders, built this house for his daughter, Virginia “Bessie” Ritter, and her husband James. James was a successful buggy salesman and a silent partner in the Hopp Carriage Company.
The Young Mansion (333 Chestnut St.) was actually two homes built as mirror images under one roof. The Young brothers, who owned a hardware store and built the Young Hotel, later called the Buffalo Valley Inn, were great supporters of the buggy industry.
4 - 350 CHESTNUT STREET
On the opposite side of the street at 350 Chestnut St. was the Gast Department Store. Henry Gast began his career pushing a cart but eventually had Enoch Miller build this structure, which was the first in the area to use pneumatic tubes.