East Conemaugh, Pennsylvania: East of a Town That's Gone

East Conemaugh, Pennsylvania, is named for a train station and for being east of another Conemaugh, a borough that Johnstown swallowed in 1889. So the town’s name points at a neighbor you can’t visit anymore.

The station and the borough next door

The clearest answer comes from Henry Wilson Storey’s 1907 History of Cambria County. East Conemaugh was cut out of Taylor Township by a court decree on September 10, 1868, and Storey says “the name is derived from the name of the railroad station Conemaugh; also from the fact that it was east of another borough named Conemaugh.”

A. Howry Espenshade’s 1925 book on Pennsylvania place names doesn’t mention the station. For him, the Conemaugh River “has given its name to East Conemaugh,” and the word East, he wrote, was needed “to distinguish this town from the older borough of Conemaugh, which was consolidated with Johnstown.” Storey gives the date: the second Conemaugh borough, created in 1849, joined the city of Johnstown on December 18, 1889, and became its Ninth and Tenth wards.

There were two Conemaughs before it

The name had been used for a borough even earlier. Joseph Johns, a Swiss immigrant, laid out a town there and called it Conemaugh. Espenshade says he named it for the Conemaugh River, while Storey says it was for “an old Indian town named Conemaugh.” It was incorporated as the borough of Conemaugh in 1831, and in 1834 the legislature changed its name to Johnstown, for Johns himself. You can follow the whole chain on two pages of Storey’s book: Conemaugh became Johnstown, a second Conemaugh grew up beside it, and East Conemaugh took its name from both the station and that second borough.

Behind all of them is the Conemaugh River. A 1905 Geological Survey bulletin by Henry Gannett calls the river’s name “an Indian word meaning ‘otter creek.’” Espenshade traces it to “the Indian Connemach,” which he says “signifies ‘otter creek,’” and Storey cites an earlier historian, George Dallas Albert, for the same meaning. All three are old books, not studies by linguists, and we didn’t find a modern one to check them against.

The railroad’s mountain yard

East Conemaugh was where the Pennsylvania Railroad got its trains ready for the mountains. The National Park Service calls it Johnstown’s marshaling yard, where trains took on extra engines, called helpers, for the climb. There were four main tracks, a sixteen-stall roundhouse and repair shops, with the homes set back from the rails. The government map from 1904 at the top of this page shows the tracks running along the river right through town.

That yard was in the path of the Johnstown Flood in May 1889. Two sections of the Day Express and a mail train were stopped there, according to the Park Service, and engineer John Hess backed his locomotive into town to warn people. Forty homes were destroyed and 22 passengers on the Day Express were killed. Locomotives weighing eighty tons were pushed up to a mile (1.6 km) downstream. That December, the Conemaugh that gave the town its “East” stopped existing as a borough of its own.

Quick answers

Why is it called East Conemaugh?

Because it grew up around the railroad station called Conemaugh, and it sat east of an older borough named Conemaugh, according to the 1907 History of Cambria County.

What happened to the original Conemaugh?

There were two. The first borough of Conemaugh was renamed Johnstown in 1834, and the second one was consolidated into Johnstown on December 18, 1889.

What does Conemaugh mean?

The old books say “otter creek.” Gannett (1905), Storey (1907) and Espenshade (1925) all give that meaning for the Indian name of the river, but none of them is a linguistic study.

Was East Conemaugh hit by the Johnstown Flood?

Yes. The National Park Service says forty homes were destroyed there and 22 passengers died on the Day Express, which was stopped in the town’s rail yard.

Key dates

1. 1831Joseph Johns's town is incorporated as the borough of Conemaugh.
2. 1834The legislature renames that first Conemaugh borough Johnstown.
3. 1849A second borough of Conemaugh is created from Conemaugh Township.
4. 1868East Conemaugh becomes a borough by court decree on September 10.
5. 1889The flood hits East Conemaugh's rail yard; in December the second Conemaugh borough is consolidated into Johnstown.

Getting there

Open East Conemaugh in Google Maps

• Map
• Directions
• Satellite
• Terrain

Opens in a new tab. The pin is the center of East Conemaugh in the USGS place-name record.

The closest airports, Amtrak stations and intercity bus stops, measured in a straight line from the center of East Conemaugh.

Airports

• John Murtha Johnstown/Cambria County (JST) 3 mi 6 km
• Arnold Palmer Regional (LBE) Latrobe 28 mi 45 km
• Pittsburgh International (PIT) 72 mi 115 km

Amtrak trains

• Johnstown station (JST) 2 mi 4 km
• Latrobe station (LAB) 26 mi 43 km

Intercity buses

• Greyhound Johnstown Bus Stop 2 mi 4 km
• Fullington Trailways Blairsville 19 mi 30 km
• BayRunner Shuttle Grantsville 47 mi 75 km

Distances are as the crow flies, not by road. We don't list schedules or fares because they change; check with the airline, Amtrak or the bus company before you go. Official data (FAA commercial service airports (2025), FAA airport locations, Amtrak stations and Intercity Bus Atlas) from the FAA and the U.S. Bureau of Transportation Statistics, checked Nov 6, 2026.

Historical Sources & References

• Henry Wilson Storey, History of Cambria County, Pennsylvania, vol. 1 (1907), pp. 42-43 and 63. East Conemaugh’s 1868 decree and the origin of its name in the station and the older borough; the two Conemaugh boroughs, Joseph Johns and Johnstown; Albert’s “Otter Creek.”
• A. Howry Espenshade, Pennsylvania Place Names (1925), pp. 189 and 219-220. Why the prefix East was needed; “Connemach,” “otter creek”; Joseph Johns, the Conemaugh River and the 1831 borough renamed Johnstown in 1834; the flood of May 1889.
• Henry Gannett, The Origin of Certain Place Names in the United States (1905), p. 89. Conemaugh, “an Indian word meaning ‘otter creek.’”
• National Park Service, “Path of the Flood”. The Pennsylvania Railroad’s marshaling yard and helper engines at East Conemaugh, and what the 1889 flood did there.
• GNIS feature 1173791 (U.S. Geological Survey). The federal gazetteer entry for East Conemaugh, in Cambria County.