Penrose Wolf Building

When you visit today’s Rockwood Mill Shoppes & Opera House, it seems like a modern repurposing of an old industrial space. Although the building was rehabilitated in the late 1990s, the original building was conceived as a mixed-use space where lumber and grain were sold from the first floor and performances and events were held on the second floor. This was the vision of Penrose Wolf, who was just 21 years old when he moved to Rockwood in 1875 to log timber on some of his father’s land. By 1898 he had been successful in the lumber business for over 20 years and was ready to settle into being a merchant. The two-story wooden building became his lumber and feed store, where locals bought construction materials to build homes and commercial buildings in Rockwood as well as flour for baking and grain, hay and straw for their animals. In 1905 Wolf built the large brick addition, a grain and lumber warehouse that backed right up to the railroad tracks—making it easy to move goods off the railroad cars and into storage. While business went on by day, by evening the opera house featured plays, vaudeville performances and some of the earliest movies. In fact, it was the rising popularity of movies that, by Wolf’s death in 1921, diminished the demand for performances at the opera house. The space still hosted civic meetings and dances, but until 1992 the building mostly functioned as a lumber store. In 2000, the opera house reopened and continues to entertain the residents of Rockwood and surrounding Somerset County.

• Source: National Register of Historic Places. Penrose Wolf Building, Rockwood, Somerset County, PA. National Register #71998013.