In the early 1840s, settlers arriving in this rugged, heavily forested part of north-central Pennsylvania first built log or simple wood-frame homes, but the community's most substantial early house was the sandstone building George Weis erected in 1845, one of the few stone buildings in the city even today. Born in Alsace in 1805, Weis came to the United States as a small boy with his parents, lived in Baltimore and later Philadelphia, and married Juliana Weisenberger in 1826; after leaving Philadelphia with his family during the Know-Nothing anti-Catholic riots of September 1844, he settled in Sanct Marienstadt, a community founded two years earlier by German Catholics seeking religious tolerance. Bringing a substantial stock of goods, he established himself as a merchant, and within a year built the stone building to serve as both store and residence. He lived there for the next thirty years and became the community's first leading merchant; his 1877 obituary said he had done a great deal to make the settlement of St. Marys a success. The house originally had a front porch, later replaced by the pair of pedimented Neo-Classical Revival-style frontispieces likely added in the 1930s. About 1865, Weis also erected the corner building for the harness shop of Albert Weis; later it housed the Weis Funeral Home and the local Red and White Grocery Store, part of one of the country's first franchised grocery chains, and it displayed more elaborate Greek Revival detailing than the earlier house.