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A Corner Transformed: 301 North Grant Avenue

 

Sometimes, preserving history means making room for what comes next.

 

The concrete block building that once stood at 301 North Grant Avenue in Kittanning is gone now. The 1,134-square-foot structure has been demolished, the 0.342-acre lot cleared, and those of you who pass by this corner of North Grant Avenue have likely already noticed — it looks better. Much better. In fact, more than a few neighbors have said exactly that.

 

But before we look forward, it’s worth pausing to look back, because even a modest building on a small lot carries the weight of lives lived, businesses run, and neighbors served.

 

What We Know (and What We Don’t)

 

One of the honest pleasures of historical research is the occasional discovery that a place’s story simply doesn’t go back as far as you’d expect. The recorded history of this particular parcel only reaches to the early 1950s and that’s worth saying plainly.

 

In the spring of 1952, William G. Aye (a well-regarded Registered Engineer in the Kittanning area) surveyed the land for a deed in which the Atlantic Refining Company was named as the buyer. Not long after, a concrete block service station rose on the lot: two repair bays, a small office, and gas pumps out front. It was the kind of neighborhood filling station that anchored a corner of daily life for decades.

 

For years, the names Hockenberry and Davidson were associated with this spot. They may have pumped your gas, changed your oil, or talked you through a repair while you waited perhaps stepping next door to the Gold Star Tavern for a cold one while your car was on the lift. That kind of community texture is hard to document and easy to forget, which is exactly why it deserves to be remembered here.

 

By 2005, a man known as Smitty had taken ownership, continuing the tradition of keeping cars running at this address. In later years, the old block building found yet another life — pool tables, sweet treats, a neighborhood gathering spot. It’s a quietly remarkable arc: from Atlantic Refining to a pool hall, all within a single concrete block shell.

 

The Armstrong County Historical Society acquired the property in 2024.

 

The Layers Beneath

 

Before the gas station, before the concrete block, there was a house.

 

A residence with a Vine Street address stood at or near this location going back to at least the early 1900s. Members of the McConnell family and others called it home over the years. When the service station was constructed in the early 1950s, that house likely came down to make way for it — progress of its own era, decisions made by people who couldn’t have imagined we’d be writing about their corner lot seven decades later.

 

During the recent demolition, the contractor uncovered something quiet and telling: pieces of old sandstone and red brick that had nothing to do with the concrete block building. Almost certainly remnants of that earlier house, lying undisturbed beneath the surface for the better part of a century. Artifacts not of great historical consequence, perhaps, but a reminder that the ground beneath our feet holds more than we know.

 

Out Lot 14, and the Longer Story

 

Zoom further out, and the picture deepens still.

 

The parcel at 301 North Grant Avenue was once part of a larger tract of land belonging to Thomas McConnell. The very same McConnell family whose name appears in the history of the house that preceded the gas station. More significantly, Thomas McConnell and his wife were the first family to reside in the building that today houses the Armstrong County Historical Museum itself.

 

That larger tract was designated as Out Lot 14 on the original plan of lots for the Borough of Kittanning, dated 1803. In a very real sense, this corner of North Grant Avenue has been part of the story of the Armstrong County Historical Society, and its predecessor families, from the very beginning of Kittanning’s recorded existence as a borough.

 

Preservation Is Progress

 

There’s a misconception, sometimes, that historical societies exist to keep things exactly as they are — that preservation and change are in tension with each other.

 

This corner offers a different lesson.

 

The Armstrong County Historical Society did not demolish this building because it lacked value. We documented it, researched it, and are telling its story here, precisely because it mattered to this community. But preservation, at its best, is about stewardship and caring for what endures, releasing what has run its course, and investing in the future with the same intention that the past deserves.

 

The cleared lot at 301 North Grant Avenue will expand green space and parking for visitors to the Museum, giving our campus room to breathe and grow. It will allow more people to engage with the history housed inside these walls including, now, the history of the very ground they’re standing on.

 

Thomas McConnell’s family once walked this land. The Hockenberrys and Davidsons worked it. Smitty fixed cars on it. And now it belongs, once again, to the community in a new form, for a new chapter.

 

That’s not the end of the story. It’s the next page.