What Made Wopsononock Mountain So Special to Me?

In July of 1972, my husband and I—along with our two young sons (our third would arrive in 1974)—moved into a rental house on the top of Wopsononock Mountain. The summer weather was gentle: not too warm, not too cool, just right. I fell in love with the place almost immediately. When circumstances required me to leave the mountain in 2011, I shed real tears. Something about that mountaintop had become part of me.

Not long after settling in, we became friends with our next-door neighbors. Over countless shared pots of coffee, they told us something astonishing: a grand hotel had once stood in their backyard, and a narrow-gauge railroad had chugged right through what was now their front yard. A hotel and a railroad—right there? Altoona isn’t my hometown, so I had never even heard of the Wopsy Hotel or the Wopsononock Railroad. But I was born with an excess of curiosity, and this mystery demanded answers.

At the time, I was a stay-at-home mother, so I began my search at the Altoona Mirror office in downtown Altoona. On the second-floor library, I introduced myself to the woman in charge, Esther Barnes, assisted by a young Tim Doyle. Ms. Barnes disappeared into an ancient filing cabinet and emerged with a small handful of brittle clippings. I paid for copies of everyone. Then she taught me how to use the microfiche machine—which began years of patient, painstaking “needle-in-a-haystack” hunts for any mention of the vanished hotel or its mountain-climbing railroad.

That was where I first found the Altoona Mirror’s June 12, 1891, front-page article describing the inaugural train trip from Juniata to the mountain top. For years I assumed the hotel opened that same summer. Not so: later research revealed the hotel had already welcomed its first guests in July 1889.

Eventually, all the filmed newspapers were transferred to the Blair County Genealogical Library in Hollidaysburg. My searches continued there—still slow, still requiring patience, still yielding the occasional gleaming nugget after hours of turning the crank to the right.

Then came 1999. I stumbled across one of the first online newspaper archives—NewspaperArchive.com—offering a searchable database for a fee. I will never forget the moment I typed “Wopsononock” into its search bar and watched dozens of results appear. It felt like striking gold. A few years later, a second major provider, Newspapers.com, arrived and expanded the possibilities even further.

Since then, I’ve downloaded hundreds of articles on the Wopsononock Resort and Railroad. Even after more than fifty years of digging, I still get a thrill when a new scrap of information appears—another piece of the puzzle. Along the way I’ve collected photographs, postcards, negatives, souvenirs, and stories about one of the region’s best-kept secrets.

A personal note: after six years in our rental, we purchased a nearby lot and built our dream home. Tom passed away in 2008. By then our boys had long since moved out, following their own careers and families. I remained on the mountain until 2011, when I finally accepted that it was time to leave. The decision was difficult, but it was the right one.

This website is the clippings and discoveries I’ve gathered—shared so that others can learn, enjoy, and perhaps fall in love with the mountain’s history just as I did.

Sincerely,

Elaine M. Conrad