Planned in 1824 to serve as the county seat, New Bloomfield is a genteel town with globed lampposts and shade trees lining the streets. Unlike Millerstown (1790) and Newport (1804), New Bloomfield's location between a creek and the foot of a hill could not accommodate the classic “Pennsylvania Town” grid plan. As a result, the courthouse square at Main and Carlisle streets is not situated in the center of town, but rather at the east end. Originally designed to showcase the new courthouse, it is now dominated by the Soldiers and Sailors Civil War Monument, a granite and bronze pillar erected in the center of the street in 1898. Most of the commercial properties surrounding the square are late Georgian in style and of red brick with white trim and bottle-green shutters, a palette that recurs throughout the town.
New Bloomfield has a fascinating array of nineteenth-century singlefamily houses built close together. Along N. Carlisle Street next to the courthouse is a handsome residential neighborhood of landscaped narrow lots with one-of-a-kind houses. At High and Carlisle streets is a three-story white clapboard house with a striking pattern created by central doors on the first and second floors and a symmetrical arrangement of thirteen windows with black shutters, bracketed eaves, and an arcaded loggia with Eastlake detailing. In contrast, across the street is a narrow two-story house built with massive blocks of cut yellow limestone and a white full-length porch. Farther along the street is a tall, asymmetrical Italianate house of orange brick with a cornice and brackets under wide eaves. At 200 N. Carlisle Street is the campus of Carson Long Military Institute, a boarding school that evolved from the Bloomfield Academy founded in 1838. The campus is built in a Jeffersonian collegiate style with red brick and white trim. Two miles northeast of New Bloomfield at 763 Dix Hill Road and PA 34, a one-room brick schoolhouse was recycled for the Harry W. Lenig Library by The Perry Historians.
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