death, his sons, Michael and Abraham Layton, operated keel boats along the river on the property to ship sand and glass products. They then sold the land to Daniel R. Davidson, who transferred it to Joseph Wilgus in 1864. Sometime around the mid to late 1860s, a pure deposit of silex, which was useful for manufacturing glass, was discovered on this land. As a village grew up around the station, it adopted the name of Layton. The first store there was opened by telegraph operator Henry Brollier, who also became the village's first postmaster. A second store was opened by P. M. Hunt in 1876. By 1880, B&O Railroad was leasing lines from the Pittsburgh and Connellsville company, and the population of Perry Township, where the Banning's and Layton railroad stations were located, had grown to one thousand four hundred and seventy-six. In 1899, a Pratt truss railroad bridge was built near Layton; it was designed by Taylor & Romine, built by A & P Roberts Co. of Philadelphia and the Pencoyd Iron Works, ultimately carried Legislative Route 26191 over the Youghiogheny River, and was subsequently added to the National Register of Historic Places on June 22, 1988. In early July 2022, the historic Layton Bridge, which had been converted from a railroad bridge to a one-lane bridge connecting Layton to Perryopolis and Route 51, was temporarily closed (through August 2022) for repairs to stabilize both the bridge itself and the tunnel providing access to it. According to District 12 bridge engineer Jeremy Hughes, "It's one of our few bridges that are over 100 years old and it's one of our few bridges that's a former railroad bridge." Civic officials decided to limit the bridge's weight restrictions to enable continued use for the immediate future by emergency vehicles and snow plows until the bridge could be replaced sometime around 2025. In popular culture A five-bedroom house in Layton was used as the location for the fictional site of a rural home used by the fictional serial killer, Jame “Buffalo Bill” Gumb, for a subterranean holding pen and murder site in the 1991 film, "The Silence of the Lambs." References Unincorporated communities in Pennsylvania Unincorporated communities in Fayette County, Pennsylvania