Sideling Hill's original structure is a concrete tower, 24 feet square and 60 feet tall, built in 1949 as an auxiliary (relay) station on AT&T's New York-to-Chicago microwave radio-relay route. The station linked Clark's Knob to the east and Bald Knob to the west. The route was placed in service on September 1, 1950. The construction of the tower by the slip-form method is described in an article, "Sliding Up at Sideling Hill" from the September 1949 issue of Long Lines magazine.
As the Long Lines microwave network grew, a 140 foot steel-lattice tower was erected adjacent to the concrete building, and antennas were installed linking the station to more destinations. A 1970 route map shows Sideling Hill having additional microwave routes going northwest to Windber, PA and southeast to Hagerstown No. 2, MD. Windber was a relay station linked to the Jennerstown, PA radio junction station, and Hagerstown No. 2 is one of several unusual hardened "Project Office" stations built by AT&T around 1964 for a classifed government program.
When fiber-optic cables replaced Sideling Hill's microwave routes, AT&T closed the station and eventually sold it to American Tower Corporation, which leases space on the tower to its clients for radio communications antennas. American Tower has produced a site brochure describing the facility.
Created on December 26, 2004 at 12:55 by Albert LaFrance