In 1849, the Vermont Central Railroad was built through Winooski, crossing East Allen Street, a road that followed a late-18th-century route connecting Burlington and the village of Winooski Falls to hamlets and farms in Essex. The village, established in the 1770s, grew in the 19th century around mills at the natural falls of the Winooski River, an area significant to Native people. In 1863, Albert O. Hood, a railroad station agent and druggist who developed and sold patent medicines, and his wife Betsey bought a large brick house on a rise east of the crossing, and their family lived there until 1919. Although the Hood House no longer stands, the railroad crossing became long known as Hood's Crossing. The surrounding land remained largely rural until the 1920s, when Winooski's population increased with mill prosperity during World War I and the city's incorporation in 1922. In 1925, local grocer Frank Niquette bought the thirteen-acre Hood property and created a subdivision of sixty-seven building lots on streets named for the Hood family and for his wife Alma's family. The neighborhood reflected suburban development trends from the 1920s through 1940s, with single-family houses built from standardized plans on uniform lots and freestanding garages that marked the growing popularity of the automobile.