A river crossing existed here since the days of the Native Americans. The original trail, called the Glades Path, was widened about 1772, becoming the Glades Road or the Great Road and connecting Bedford to Washington, Pennsylvania. Westward immigrants built flatboats here to travel downriver. The original settlement was named Simralls Ferry and later Robb's Ferry after Isaac Robb, who laid out the town in 1794 after Federal troops burned his fences while quelling the Whiskey Insurrection. The town was first called Robbstown and later renamed West Newton. The river opened to two-way steamboat navigation in 1850, and ten years later the railroad came to town. Good transportation and coal from local mines made West Newton an ideal manufacturing center. Its first and biggest industry was the Markle paper mill, opened in 1859 to supply western Pennsylvania with quality paper. Wood pulp came from a mill in Markleton, Somerset County. After both mills closed in 1893 because of water pollution, the West Newton mill was bought by the U.S. Radiator Company, which made heating radiators here until 1955.