Sayre grew from several distinct areas shaped by railroads, utilities, and older mill communities. The Lehigh Valley Railroad built the Victorian-era Queen Ann style Sayre Passenger Station in 1881 beside the ornate three-story brick Seneca Division Office Building, which had been constructed in 1876; the station survives as the museum of the Sayre Historical Society, while the Division Office was demolished in 1946. During W.W. II, the Division Office served as headquarters for the Sayre Canteen, where community volunteers served 621,000 members of the military transported on troop trains stopping at the Sayre Passenger Station of the LVRR. Sayre's earliest development was along North and South Thomas Avenue on the East Side and in two more blocks of homes toward the Susquehanna River, making East Side the oldest part of Sayre outside of Milltown, with the first businesses and hotels along Thomas Avenue, before growth spread across the tracks to the Desmond Street area and beyond. Another important development came in 1881 with the Sayre Water Company on the western bank of the Susquehanna River; under president Howard Elmer, the company steadily extended water lines, and piped domestic water made building lots in the hamlet of Sayre more attractive to new residents, helping turn Sayre into a boomtown. Milltown had preceded Sayre by nearly 100 years, beginning in 1783 with a gristmill along Shepard Creek; altogether nine mills operated from Milltown to Factoryville, powered by water wheels driven by dams and millraces, and the first gristmill, sold in 1788, became John Shepard's Mill. For several decades Milltown was a center of industry and trade, with mills as well as a school and schoolmaster, physician, tanner, shoemaker, blacksmith, deerskin leather dresser, distillery, post office, and cemetery. West Sayre, on the old Milltown Road between Athens and Milltown, developed separately but alongside Sayre; tied to downtown when needed by the Waverly, Sayre & Athens Trolley, it otherwise functioned as a self-contained community with businesses, a pharmacy, a constable, a fire station, the Fourth Ward School, the College Hill School, a corner church, and Substation No. 1 of the Sayre Post Office.