Mount Union

Look at the sign in the yard.

This little brick building on Market Street was the General Refractories Company office. When the company closed its Mount Union yard in the early 1950s, the brickyard and seven houses next to it were leveled. Three buildings were spared, for a reason that had nothing to do with sentiment: the office, the superintendent's house and a weigh shed happened to sit on a line with the residential streets instead of with the plant. The shed became somebody's house. The office became the local Red Cross headquarters. The plant site itself was cleared and became the town's park and athletic field.

The Red Cross goes a long way back here. Huntingdon County has had a chapter at Mount Union since the First World War, covering everything east and south of Jacks Mountain, and in the 1920s it was running classes in town in sewing and cooking for the newest families.

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Did you know? The building that killed six men at Mount Union had been catching fire all summer, and the paper reported it as routine local news.

August 5, 1916, in the Mount Union column of the Harrisburg Telegraph: "A number of fires occurred during the week in the cotton dry house at the Aetna powder plant."

August 19: "A fire took place in the cotton dry house at the powder plant this week, destroying some powder."

September 2: "Several fires occurred during the week in the cotton dry house at the powder plant."

September 20, page one: "SIX MEN KILLED BY EXPLOSION AT MOUNT UNION. Cotton Dry House at Plant of Aetna Explosives Company Completely Destroyed."

It happened at six in the morning. The men were changing shifts, and the paper says that is the only reason it was not far worse, because the night workers were already walking away from the building. The dry house stood about four hundred yards off from everything else, along the river bank. The injured were taken to the Huntingdon Hospital.

Six men. In a building the whole town knew kept catching fire.

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Most company towns were laid out by engineers with almost no thought given to how they would feel to live in. Kistler was different. In 1916 the Mount Union Refractories Company hired John Nolen of Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the best known town planners in the country, to design a whole village across the river from the plant. The New York firm of Mann and MacNeill drew the buildings. The town was finished in 1917 with ninety four company built dwellings, seventeen of them two family houses and seventy seven single family houses, built to six different plans. Nolen thought well enough of it to write it up himself ten years later in a book called New Towns for Old.

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This is the inside of the packing shed at the No. 1 works. Every one of those posts is doing a job, and the floor runs on past the end of the photograph.

It is also worth being honest about what the work cost. Silica yards were harder on a man than fire clay yards, because the air carried a far heavier load of silica dust, and silica dust causes silicosis. The men in crushing, in grinding and in shipping breathed the worst of it. Pennsylvania's own Bureau of Industrial Hygiene published a study of silicosis in the silica brick industry in 1941, so this was known.

Thousands of brickyard workers across this region got it. By the time it was formally accepted in the late 1960s as a product of the working conditions, the companies had become offices in far away cities, and a man or his widow had to find a doctor who would certify it and a lawyer who would carry the dust claim.

We should not tell the story of this town without that part in it.

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The federal survey describes them exactly as they still stand: two rows of one and a half story, gambrel roofed houses along east Water Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, built by the General Refractories Company for its workers.

In the early 1950s the company sold them. Across the whole region the brick companies followed the same policy when they got out of the housing business, which was to give the family already living in the house the first chance to buy it. By 1966 the last of those deeds had been recorded and the company town was over.

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When the last of it was over, the town went and got the bricks.

A committee collected brick and some of the most elaborate shapes from all three Mount Union plants and built a platform for a mailbox on the public sidewalk beside the post office, at Market and South Jefferson. The plaque set into it reads Bricktown Ganister and lists the plants by name. Look closely at the picture and you can pick out the shapes that were never ordinary bricks at all.

The Mount Union Times ran it under a headline that got it right: Mailbox Holder A Tribute To Bricktowners' Heritage.

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This stone house stands on West Water Street near Division. The federal survey records it as the John Sharrar House and dates it to about 1841. The photographer noted that the gable end you cannot see in this picture was the canal side, because the Pennsylvania Mainline Canal came through here in 1829 and Mount Union started life as a canal village.

Here is the honest problem. The county's 1937 history says the town was laid out in 1840 by William Pollock, for John Sharrer. The Historic American Buildings Survey says the town plan was laid out and lots offered for sale in 1849. Both are serious sources and they do not agree, and we are not going to pick the one we like better.

So we will ask.

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As the wartime labor market kept expanding, and a third brick plant and a government munitions plant went up, Mount Union drew a number of African American workers from the South. The federal survey puts it plainly: it gave the town a mix of nationalities and races that was new to central Pennsylvania at the time.

The survey records this building at Chestnut and Division streets as constructed by African American residents in 1921. The history of that community was serious enough to carry a master's thesis of its own at Penn State in 1987, written by R. Cummins McNitt.

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The demand for steel in the First World War pushed silica brick production to a level the county could not staff. Employment at Huntingdon County refractories hit an all time high of 1,800 in 1919, and more than 1,600 of those jobs were in Mount Union alone. Local people could not fill them, so the companies hired eastern and southern European workers, and the town filled up with families who had been somewhere else a year before. By 1910 the Ganister Hill section already held Italian, Austro-Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, Russian and Macedonian households.

They built this. The federal survey records the church at North Jefferson and Sherman streets as constructed by East European immigrants in 1915 and 1916.

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For most of the plant's life the ganister came from the far side of the Juniata and had to be hauled across the river and across the main line. In the late 1940s Harbison-Walker moved the mining to the mountainside directly above the plant and set the crushing and washing at intervals down the slope, with an overhead conveyor to bring the rock the rest of the way in.

That decision took about a hundred company houses with it. The Ganister Hill neighborhood stood in the way, and the conveyor belt ran between two of the houses. Residents were allowed to buy their own homes for salvage, for around two hundred dollars, and a good deal of that lumber went back up as new houses in the flats along the river. To shelter the families who were displaced, the Huntingdon County housing authority built its first federally supported project on the east edge of town.

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A Norman Cottage sits gable end to the street, one and a half stories, with one roof slope run out long to cover a side porch and a three window bay pushed out of the front. Twenty three were built at Kistler and twenty one were still there when the federal survey counted them.

Kenneth and Edna Cox kept theirs exactly as it was built. No additions, no alterations to the outside. The survey noticed something quiet and human in that. For most of the century it was a mark of getting ahead to modernize a company house. By 1991 the neighbors were asking the Coxes not to touch theirs.

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In 1899 the W. H. Haws Company of Johnstown began building a plant at the west end of Shirley Street. The federal engineering survey that documented it records what that plant was: the first works in the United States built exclusively to manufacture silica brick. Nowhere else in the country had anyone put up a factory for that one purpose and nothing else. Harbison and Walker of Pittsburgh, one of the largest refractory makers in the world, bought it within a few years and built a second works beside it. By 1910 the two together employed more than 600 men and could turn out 150,000 bricks a day.

This is what the yard looked like when federal surveyors photographed it after the closing. The kilns were gone. The stacks were still up.

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Not numbers. Names. They are written on John Nolen's own plan for the town, and the federal survey copied them down: Double Valley Farm House, Double Mountain House, Double Capri Villa, Georgian Cottage, Vermont Farm House, and Norman Cottage.

The architects picked those old fashioned forms on purpose. They believed the character of a building could shape the character of the people living inside it, and the families coming to Kistler were going to be a mix of native born Americans, immigrants and African Americans who had never been asked to live the way the company had in mind.

This one is No. 43 Poplar Street, a Vermont Farm House. Twenty seven of them were built and all but one were still standing when the surveyors counted. The caption notes this one still had its original porch roof and its original siding.

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At the end of November 1985 a Harbison-Walker spokesman told the United Steelworkers that the Mount Union plant was closing, because the silica brick market had all but collapsed. Somewhere between twenty five and forty seven people were still on the payroll. In 1925 there had been 563.

Then came a strange postscript that says everything about what was made here. Mount Union and one General Refractories plant in Claysburg were the only two operations in the entire country that made silica shapes and nothing else, the odd sizes that coke ovens are built out of. When Mount Union shut, customers with coke ovens still running discovered there was nowhere left to buy replacements. So the retired plant manager and three former employees went in, gathered up the molds, and shipped them to a plant in Utah so the brick could still be made. What was left over was sold for scrap in April of 1989.

North American's yard closed in March of 1990. That was the end of it.

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The third brickyard in town was started by two men who used to run the first one. R. P. M. Davis and Clinton V. Hackman, both former managers for Harbison-Walker, organized the Mount Union Refractories Company and built its plant in 1911 and 1912 on the edge of town along the Juniata. It opened with eight kilns. During the First World War they built twenty one more.

In 1922 the company put up a second plant in Clearfield County and renamed itself U.S. Refractories. In 1930 it merged into North American Refractories. The yard ran until March of 1990, and all but two of its beehive kilns came down after that.

This is the plant seen from Kistler, the town it built.

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This is 118 Market Street, the General Refractories superintendent's house. It is still there.

The same company owned forty one houses in Mount Union, scattered in four different places. Two rows of gambrel roofed houses along east Water Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. A row of seven, two stories, right up against the plant on Wausau Place. Six frame houses on Shirley Street. And twelve one story shanties across Hill Valley Run on the far side of the plant, in a section the town called Shantytown. Not far off was Mount Union Refractories' own row of shanties, which somebody with a sense of humor had nicknamed Little Kistler.

When the divesting came, the houses that looked like houses were sold to the families in them. The shanties were judged unfit to pass into private hands and were pulled down. One end of the company's housing survived to be photographed. The other end did not.

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In 1906 the Pennsylvania Railroad replaced its bridge over the Juniata east of Mount Union. The new one runs 668 feet on six stone arches of a hundred feet each, built of the massive cut stone the railroad used everywhere. It took eight months and twenty days and was finished that December. The four span truss bridge it replaced was handed over to automobiles.

It was part of a much larger straightening and rebuilding program between Ryde, in Mifflin County, and Mount Union. In 1907 the Semi-Weekly News of Huntingdon ran the numbers on all of it under a headline that has aged very well: PRR Spends $3,250,000 to Save 22 Seconds.

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1908, a year into the boom, and Mount Union had a baseball team. These young men, many the sons of immigrant families who came for the brick work, claimed their place in American culture through the game. Baseball diamonds are where factory towns proved they belonged.

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This was the Harbison-Walker manager's house, at 213 Shirley Street.

The federal study of these towns explains what you are looking at without needing to say a word about this particular house. In a company town the rank was built into the street. A large and deliberately distinctive house for the man in charge, set at a distance and often up on a rise, and much smaller identical houses with no ornament on them at all for everybody else. You could read a man's place in the works off the porch he came home to.

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Beyond the brick plants and the railroads, there's the Aughwick, the creek that makes this valley livable. The Rod and Gun Club connected people to the river and the woods, a counterpoint to factory life.

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The HABS team surveyed Mount Union as a company town, where housing was owned by the factory, streets were laid out by the factory, and life revolved around the factory whistle. Over 140 company-built houses in this town of 3,300 people.

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The HABS surveyors walked every street of Mount Union's company housing, documenting row houses, duplexes, and family homes, all owned by the factory. This is the record of how industrial employers controlled the towns they created.

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Company housing from the HABS survey, the brick companies didn't just employ workers, they housed them. Entire neighborhoods were built and owned by the plant. Families lived in company houses, shopped at company stores, and depended on the company whistle.

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November 22, 1906, Roy Jones sends a postcard to Miss Maud, telling her about hunting rabbits in Mount Union. Fifteen rabbits, a shared meal, and a moment of life preserved in a one-cent stamp and fountain-pen handwriting. These personal postcards are the voice of the era.

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Coulter School on December 29, 1897, Miss Minnie Jones and her pupils gathered for a photograph. This is Mount Union before the brickyards changed everything, when a one-room schoolhouse educated the valley's children. Education and ambition went hand in hand even then.

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Downtown Mount Union in its prime, grocery stores, furniture dealers, clothiers, theaters, and banks all competing for boom-town money. Every storefront meant jobs beyond the brick plants.

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Street-level perspectives reveal how company towns felt to people who lived in them, the scale of housing, the proximity to neighbors, the relationship between home and street.

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The HABS survey wasn't just housing, it captured downtown streets, commercial blocks, and the public spaces of Mount Union during the brick era.

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The East Broad Top locomotive working Mount Union in 1907, a narrow-gauge workhorse hauling coal from the Broad Top mines to the PRR main line. The EBT was the connecting link between the mines to the west and the wider rail network that fed America's steel mills.

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This Baldwin locomotive, built in 1911, worked the East Broad Top for nearly 50 years. When the EBT quit carrying freight and passengers in 1956, people thought that was the end. But the engines endured, and today the East Broad Top is running again, not hauling coal, but carrying tourists and history.

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Look at the planing mill in 1936 and you can see exactly how high the water rose, the mark is visible on the building. That line tells the story of March 17, 1936, when the Juniata broke all records and flooded everything in its path.

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The St. Patrick's Day Flood of March 1936 put water where the town stood. Streets became rivers, buildings became obstacles, and the disaster was so severe that Congress acted, the Flood Control Act of 1936 was a direct response to this flood and others.

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Georgi Vasilev, pictured in Naroden Glas, one face among the thousands of Balkan immigrants who came to Mount Union for the brickyards. These families didn't just work the kilns; they built churches, schools, neighborhoods, and a lasting home.

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The Harbison-Walker complex sprawled across Mount Union, kilns, molding rooms, storage, rail yards, all connected. One photo can't capture it. The HAER documentation required dozens of images from different angles.

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The HAER photographers understood that documenting Harbison-Walker meant capturing the whole ecosystem, not just the main plant, but all the supporting structures that made it run.

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The HAER survey is an archive of industrial architecture before it all fell apart. These photographs preserve what was built, how it worked, and why it mattered to American industry.

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This is what you faced if you took a kiln job at Harbison-Walker, extreme heat, constant monitoring, days of firing to get the brick right. The work was critical, dangerous, and hot beyond what modern workers would accept.

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July 4th, 1906, Mount Union's still-small town comes out for a parade. The brick boom hasn't fully arrived yet, but the traditions are there: bands, bunting, marching down the main street. This is America asserting itself through ritual.

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One of the oldest, most faded views we have of Market Street, from around the turn of the last century. Time and the camera have washed most of it soft, but you can still make out the old street lamps and the shape of a small town on the edge of its brick boom. What corner do you think this is? Photo: Historic Mount Union archive

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This is what a subway looks like in Mount Union. No underground trains here, the subway was the underpass that carried you safely beneath the Pennsylvania Railroad tracks while the freights rolled overhead. In a town built around the rails, it was the only way across when a long coal drag had the crossing blocked. Do you remember walking through the subway? Photo: Historic Mount Union archive

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The East Broad Top yard at Mount Union went in with the line itself, in 1873, and its whole reason for existing was that two railroads of two different widths met here. Everything coming off the narrow gauge had to get onto standard gauge cars, and everything going the other way had to come off.

They kept finding better ways to do it. Around 1922 an overhead electric gantry crane went up to move McKelvey Brothers lumber from one railroad to the other. In 1933, after the lumbering had stopped, that same rig was put to a smarter use: instead of moving the load, they lifted whole standard gauge cars off their wheels and set them down on narrow gauge trucks. The original apron conveyor was rebuilt in 1925 with a sand flotation cleaning plant, which let the Rockhill Coal and Iron Company ship nine separate grades of coal out of this yard.

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Step into Peduzzi's and look down. The name is set in tile at the doorway, a promise made a century ago that's still visible today. Italian families like the Peduzzis and Melonis came for the brick work and stayed to anchor downtown Mount Union. Their soda counters and lunch rooms became the heart of the town.

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The Shapiro family built two businesses in Mount Union, a movie house that opened in 1915 and a furniture warehouse that served the town through decades. That's merchant instinct: see what a town needs, build it, grow it.

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Stand at the corner of Shirley and Jefferson today, and you're standing on the same spot where boom-town Mount Union traded in commerce and news and paychecks. The buildings are older, some storefronts are different, but the bones of the place haven't changed.

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Industrial storage at the Harbison-Walker complex. These silos held finished brick waiting for the railroad cars that would carry them to the furnaces of Pittsburgh and beyond. Mount Union's silica brick was a commodity traded by the ton.

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Strickler's in the 1950s, full service in every way: pump your gas, fix your car, sell you a cold drink, and maybe a sandwich for the road. By the 1960s, these corner stores were vanishing, replaced by gas stations and convenience chains that didn't know your name.

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The federal survey recorded this storefront on Shirley Street under the name it carried: T. A. Giacobello Foreign Supplies Store. That was what a store called itself when it stocked what the newer families in town could not buy anywhere else.

The surveyors took a second photograph from the same spot looking the other way, up the street toward the old entrance to the Harbison-Walker brickyard. That is how close it was. The store sat at one end of the walk and the gate sat at the other.

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The wheels buckled and intertwined, metal folded like paper under the force of the collision. This is the physical evidence of the impact that killed about twenty people in seconds.

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February 27, 1917, the day everything stopped. The sleeper car of the Mercantile Express lies twisted, and a lone figure stands watching. Inside were twenty people who wouldn't go home that night. Photographers captured the disaster raw, selling postcards of the wreck across the state.

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Walk under this stone arch and you're stepping through Italian immigrant craftsmanship, stonemasonry built in the early 1900s when the railroad was expanding through the valley. A hundred years later, trains still cross it.

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The county's own history book, published for the sesquicentennial in 1937, lists the banks then operating in Huntingdon County. Two of them were here: the Central National Bank of Mount Union and the First National Bank of Mount Union.

The book makes a point of something that would not have felt small at the time. Every one of the county's banks stayed open and solvent straight through the years from 1929 to 1937, and all of them were on solid ground when it was written.

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The Captain Jack Motel in the early 1950s, a new type of lodging for a new era. The brick boom was waning, but Mount Union was adjusting: highways, automobiles, travelers passing through instead of staying for business. The motel represented a different kind of future.

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Alongside the brick plants, the Pennsylvania Railroad ran a tie-treating operation, pressure-treating millions of wooden crossties with creosote before they went out to the main line. It was another industrial anchor, another steady payroll.

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The Crum Building on Jefferson Street, one of the brick boom's architectural monuments. Built when money was flowing and the sidewalks were full of workers spending payday wages. Many of these storefronts are still standing today.

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The Dinky Bridge, not a passenger line, but a workhorse. This little quarry railroad hauled ganister rock down from Jacks Mountain to the brick plants. If not for that ganister and that bridge, Mount Union would have been just another small valley town.

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When the federal survey team walked the East Broad Top yard, this is part of what they found. A concrete block engine house going soft at the edges, tracks running out of it lined with abandoned EBT coal hoppers, and inside, still sitting where it had been left, a switch engine that once worked these yards.

The survey also noted what had grown up along the Route 522 side of the same yard by then: a supermarket, a drug store and a bank.

One end of the property was a parking lot. The other end had a locomotive in a shed.

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February 27, 1917 is the date Mount Union remembers, a coal freight collided with the sleeper car of the Mercantile Express, and in seconds about twenty people were dead. Seven of them were members of a single family, the Minds. The disaster was so dramatic that photographers sold real-photo postcards of the wreck across the state.

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The Mount Union fire department and a crowd of dignitaries on the engine in front of the Municipal Building, 1920. In a tight-packed brick town, the volunteer firemen were a real point of pride, one bad fire could take a whole block. Did you or your family ever serve on the department? Photo: Historic Mount Union archive

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The St. Patrick's Day Flood of March 17-18, 1936 wasn't a passing inconvenience, it was catastrophic. The Dinky Bridge, which had hauled ganister for decades, was destroyed. Towns across the Juniata Valley were wrecked. The disaster was big enough that Congress passed the Flood Control Act that year.

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The Pennsylvania Railroad put up a new freight depot in Mount Union in 1914, on Pennsylvania Avenue between Depot and Washington streets. It did not replace the old freight office so much as grow onto it. Sanborn insurance maps from 1919 still show part of the older building attached to the east side, and the line of that old roof could be read on the east wall long after the building itself came off.

When the federal survey team came through, the depot had sat unused for twenty years or more, Conrail had announced plans to tear it down, and a group of townspeople was trying to acquire it for a community library or a senior citizens center.

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The G. W. Radle store, one family's answer to the question, "How do you feed a boom town?" With supply lines, trust, and willingness to extend credit between paydays. Radle and a hundred stores like it kept Mount Union running.

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The General Refractories Company office in Mount Union. Harbison-Walker gets the headlines, but it wasn't the only brick empire in town, General Refractories ran its own plant and its own company houses on the east end, all of it built on Jacks Mountain ganister. Which brickyard did your family work? Photo: Library of Congress (HAER)

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The Harbison-Walker Refractories works, the plant that made Mount Union 'Bricktown USA.' Beehive kilns, brick stacks, and acres of works turning Jacks Mountain ganister into the silica brick that lined America's steel furnaces, with the town it built climbing the hill behind. Photo: Library of Congress (HAER)

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The J. E. Everett grocery in 1910, right in the middle of the decade that changed everything. Between 1900 and 1910, Mount Union's population exploded from about a thousand to over three thousand. Groceries like Everett's had to expand fast to keep pace.

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The Kenmar Hotel in 1908. A brick town on the main line drew a steady stream of visitors, salesmen, investors, and railroad men, and they all needed a bed and a hot meal. A hotel like the Kenmar was a sign Mount Union had arrived. Did anyone in your family work at one of the old hotels in town? Photo: Historic Mount Union archive

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Kistler was about as complete a company town as this region produced. The company built and kept up virtually every building in it, along with the roads, the water and the electric.

This was the store and school building. The federal photographer got there in time, because the caption on this negative carries four words that end the story: demolished in 1990.

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The molding room at Harbison-Walker, a craft operation hidden inside an industrial giant. Hand-pressed ganister, careful shaping, then off to the kilns. The work was skilled and back-breaking, day shift and night shift, always the same pace.

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The packing shed at the Harbison-Walker works. This is where it all ended up, finished silica brick, crated and loaded onto the Pennsylvania Railroad for the steel furnaces of Pittsburgh and beyond. Mount Union brick lined the mills that built America. Photo: Library of Congress (HAER)

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The PRR depot was Mount Union's front door, dozens of trains a day passing through on the Middle Division, connecting Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. This was why the brick companies chose Mount Union. Good iron, good labor, and the rails already here.

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The date is cut into the front of the building: 1936.

That same year the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture sent an artist to put a mural inside it. He signed it Paul Rohland. What he chose to paint is the part worth keeping. He did not center the picture on a church or a courthouse or a mountain. He put Harbison-Walker's smoking kilns and the rows of Ganister Hill houses dead in the middle of it.

Fifteen years later the company tore every one of those houses down. The painting is still on the wall.

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The crew of the Silica Brick Works, this is the human side of industrial statistics. Each face represents a decade or more of work at the kilns, in the molding rooms, at the presses. Some are immigrants, some American-born, all essential to the boom.

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Kistler Elementary sits at the end of Cedar Street. The federal survey records two things about it that belong together: the brick school in the company town dates to 1936, and the building was put up by the Works Progress Administration.

A company built the houses. The government built the school. The children who filled it were the children of men making brick for steel mills two hundred miles away.

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A green brick holds so much water that it would blow apart in the kiln, so before anything else it had to be dried. Left in the yard that took days and depended entirely on the weather. The yards fixed that by running flues under the drying floors, and later by circulating steam and waste heat off the kilns. This is the rotary dryer and its conveyors.

Then the burning. Setters stacked the bricks inside the kiln in patterns worked out so the heat could get everywhere evenly, the door was bricked shut, and the firemen brought the temperature up over a period of days to more than two thousand degrees. Then they had to bring it back down just as slowly. A single firing cycle could run twenty days, with loading and unloading on either end of that.

Twenty days, for one kiln of brick, done by men who knew by feel when it was right.

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In a 1917 advertisement, Harbison-Walker called itself the largest manufacturer of refractory materials in the world, and called its Mount Union operation the largest silica brick plant in the world.

Those were the company's own words about itself, and the federal survey quotes them as such. What the survey states in its own voice is more than enough: by 1910 the plant employed more than six hundred men and could produce 150,000 bricks a day.

This is a rare color photograph looking south down the No. 2 kilns. That pale cream color in the stacks is not the light. That is what silica brick looks like.

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Thousands of people climb the Thousand Steps every year. Far fewer know they were somebody's job.

The federal engineering survey has the answer, and it got it from the man responsible. Frank Pollicino, who worked in the Harbison-Walker quarry in the 1970s, asked John Shaffer, the superintendent of the mine, about the steps cut into the south face of Jacks Mountain. Shaffer said he had his own quarry workers build them, in 1936, to give the men a better way up to their work. The survey adds one more thing worth knowing: it came right after the flood of 1936 destroyed the dinky bridge, and Shaffer may simply have been looking for something to keep his crew working until the damage was repaired and the quarry could run again.

So a flood shut a mountain down, and the men built a staircase up it while they waited.

The stone building in this picture is the engine repair house the company kept up at the quarry.

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Georgi Vasilev, from the village of Krushoradi in the Lerin district, lived in Mount Union, Pa. This portrait appeared in Naroden Glas, the Bulgarian language newspaper of America. The newspaper published portraits and advertisements featuring Bulgarian and Macedonian Americans.

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A Mount Union street in 1907, dirt road, board sidewalks, and a town in the middle of an explosion. The brickyards were hiring every hand they could find, and the population tripled from 1,086 in 1900 to 3,338 by 1910.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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Mount Union in 1906, drawn from the air before airplanes, T. M. Fowler's bird's-eye map, made just as the brick boom ignited. Every street, mill, and church is here. In the decade after this was drawn, the town tripled in size.

Zoom in and find your house!

📷 Photo: Library of Congress (T. M. Fowler panoramic map, 1906)

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The Pennsylvania Railroad's first creosote tie-treating plant stood northeast of Mount Union along the Juniata River, opened just before 1909 when this photo was taken. The plant was the PRR's first industry of this kind: treating wooden railroad ties with creosote to preserve them. About seven thousand gallons of creosote were used daily, imported from Europe and stored in Philadelphia before being shipped here. The plant kept about five hundred thousand ties on hand at any given time, treating around two thousand daily. Carl W. Tiffany supervised the operation with approximately fifty men. Many of the men standing in this photograph may be your great grandfathers or great uncles.

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One corner, many lives: an early hotel called the Broad Top House stood here in canal days on the corner of Jefferson Street and Railroad Avenue. The Crum building stands there today, having replaced it. Inside the Crum building worked the barber James Nevell, in a fine room opposite the Beers Hotel. He entered the barbering business for himself in November 1896 and controlled a large clientele with expert skill. That corner watched Mount Union transform from canal village to industrial boom to today.

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In 1889, William DeFrehn and his sons arrived in Mount Union from Williamsport in Maryland to start a chair factory. A flood had damaged their establishment back home. They bought the old tannery that R. J. Faust had dismantled and converted it to their factory. Seven sons worked in the business: Robert, William Jr., Edward, Charles, Frank, Augustus, and George.

Thousands of fine quality chairs of various styles were sent from this place to various parts of the country, the 1909 history records. The factory occupied the western edge of town along the Pennsylvania Railroad siding. In February 1892, fire destroyed the building, but they rebuilt. The DeFrehn brothers left for Johnstown in 1898, though others operated the plant afterward.

Did your family sit in one of those chairs? Did they work at the factory? We would like to hear what you remember.

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Charles Dickens took a canal boat down the Juniata River in the 1840s, when the waterway was the main road. The canal had replaced the earlier ferries, offering faster passage than the river crossings that came before. In his 1909 history, Charles H. Welch recorded Dickens's own words about the journey: "There was much in this mode of traveling which I heartily enjoyed at the time, and look back upon with great pleasure."

This photograph shows the river Dickens saw. The stone bridge visible here was built in 1906. In Dickens' day, travelers depended on the canal boats to cross.

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Before every bridge there was a ferry. Drake's Ferry, which flourished in the early 1800s, was the first recorded crossing on the Juniata at Mount Union, established in 1783 as a store and ferry serving travelers heading south toward Baltimore and Harper's Ferry. A canal-era traveler in the 1830s called the scenery there sublime, writing it "is not excelled in any part of Pennsylvania." The ferry was a key stop on one of the busiest roads in early Pennsylvania, and the crossing was so important that in 1848 a charter was granted for the Drake's Ferry and East Broad Top Railroad to connect this route. That railroad was never built. A pioneer stone house by the ferry, home to early settlers, stood until a train wreck destroyed it around 1858 or 1859, just as the railroad age overtook the ferry age. Today the crossing looks different under the stone arches, but the geography that made this spot vital never changed.

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An East Broad Top train working Mount Union in 1950. This town was the northern end of the narrow gauge, a big dual-gauge yard and a coal cleaning plant where Broad Top coal met the Pennsylvania Railroad main line and fired the brick kilns. The EBT quit common-carrier runs in 1956, but she's running excursions again today.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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The G. W. Radle store in Mount Union sold farm supplies. Farm Equipment and Farm Supplies, the signs read in the window glass. A Mail Pouch thermometer hung on the wall, and the photo captures the sidewalk too: kids and a dog, the texture of a small-town business day.

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A 1922 advertisement for the Stoianoff Brothers of Mount Union, printed in Naroden Glas, the Bulgarian-Macedonian newspaper in America. Families from Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, and Russia filled the hundred company houses on Ganister Hill, often boarding five to ten single countrymen at a time while they worked the brickyards. Their names are still on mailboxes all over this valley.

📷 Image: Naroden Glas, 1922 (public domain)

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This is Clinton V. Hackman, superintendent of the Harbison-Walker brick plant when Mount Union's 1909 history was written. But his larger mark on the valley came after he left the Works. Hackman was one of two former Harbison-Walker managers who organized Mount Union Refractories in 1911, built on the Juniata's edge. That company then built company houses in Kistler, the planned industrial town in Mifflin County.

The man in this portrait ran a major brick operation on the Juniata and then founded an empire. Did your family work for Hackman, or know the men who started their own companies after the Works?

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Happy Fourth of July from Historic Mount Union! An American Legion parade rolls through town in the 1940s. This town sent its sons to both World Wars, and its kilns and powder plant served on the home front in each.

Proud of every Mount Union veteran, then and now. 🇺🇸

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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The plant that built Bricktown. Harbison-Walker put up its Mount Union works in 1899 and expanded in 1905, drawn here by a main rail line and a mountain of ganister rock right at the back door. Its silica brick lined the steel furnaces of Pittsburgh. The complex joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.

📷 Photo: Library of Congress, HAER

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We have shared photographs of the Harbison-Walker plant abandoned, silent under the federal survey cameras. This is the plant alive. It is 1909. Smoke rises from the round beehive kilns visible in the yard. Workers stand among the structures that made the town prosper. One of those workers may have been Charles Wenzel, the German brickmaker who came to Mount Union in 1899 and worked in the silica brick industry that shaped this valley. The kilns themselves are nearly gone now, reduced to bare stacks. But in this plate from the town's 1909 history, the furnaces are running at full steam.

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Mount Union's fire protection before 1903, when getting to the blaze depended on hooves and volunteer grit. Salute to every firefighter who has served this town since.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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In 1909, when Charles H. Welch published his History of Mount Union, the town was already nostalgic. He printed Jack's Spring twice: as it used to be, and as it is today. The spring is celebrated for its cool, silvery water. Welch's side-by-side plates show a landscape transformed within a lifetime. The wild spring of the earlier days gave way to carefully walled stone, a visible mark of progress and care.

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Mount Union in 1909 was more worldly than people imagine. Alley Kasan came to America in 1901 and by 1903 opened a grocery on West Shirley Street. Ye Hing Song, described in the town's own history book as a laundryman, kept his shop in the Welch building at the corner of Pennsylvania Avenue and Jefferson Street. Both men appear in Charles Welch's 1909 History of Mount Union, Shirleysburg and Shirley Township as businessmen of the community, their livelihoods sketched with the same respect given to carpenters and merchants born here. A grocer from a village near Beirut. A laundryman from China. Neighbors at the corner.

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Before the brick works came the tannery. In 1883, when Mount Union's chief industry was A. D. Faust and Sons, they could process 13,000 hides a year with a crew of 25 men. The tannery had been built in 1859 by Mr. Bare and ran for decades before silica brick would transform the town.

The 1909 photograph shows the Juniata Oak Extract Works, part of that leather era. Workers and buildings stand in it that you might recognize if your family was here then. Among the people who made their way to this valley was Franz Heidel, a German cabinetmaker born beside an old castle in Freidenberg, Baden. In 1865, at 22 years old, he survived an 80-day Atlantic crossing starting from Antwerp. A serious storm almost destroyed the vessel mid-voyage, but Heidel made it through to a new life in America.

Mount Union's boom decade came fast and fierce. The tannery gave way to three brick plants and an explosives factory. The population more than tripled between 1900 and 1910.

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Meloni's Bar, one of the Italian-American family businesses that took root when immigrant workers came to Mount Union for the brickyards and the railroad, and stayed to build the town.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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Walk into the Mount Union post office and look up: in 1936, Treasury Department artist Paul Rohland painted this mural of the town as part of the New Deal's public art program. The same decade the flood hit, Uncle Sam gave Mount Union a piece of national art history.

📷 Photo: Library of Congress / HABS (Paul Rohland, 1936)

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The brick church in this photograph stood on the southeast corner of Shirley and Division Streets for over forty years. Built in 1866 and 1867, it was formally dedicated in November of that year, replacing an older frame church from 1849. The congregation worshiped there until 1908, when a new church building was completed.

The story begins with Rev. Britton E. Collins, who started preaching in Mount Union in 1845. By 1849 the community had built a frame church for $500. The congregation was formally organized with fourteen members on May 2, 1865, and by 1909 it had grown to 360. The brick church that replaced the frame building cost $4,500 and served as the center of community life for decades.

What happened to the brick church after 1908? If you have memories of it, or know what became of the building and the lot, we would love to hear.

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The storefront of J. E. Everett in Mount Union, photographed around 1910. Two people stand in the central doorway, framed between two windows. On the left, the word Groceries. On the right, the word Confectionery. A Mail Pouch crate or sign sits at ground level.

One storefront with two separate names. The couple in the photograph occupy the space between them, the merchants of this arrangement, though we do not know their names. One doorway, one storefront, two different departments under the Everett name.

Who were the two people in this doorway? If you are descended from J. E. Everett, or if this corner belonged to your Mount Union memory, tell us their story. Someone will recognize this storefront and know.

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Parade day in the 1920s, when a boom town's sidewalks filled shoulder to shoulder for a band and a banner. Some things about a small town never change.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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Peduzzi's Soda and Lunch, the counter at the heart of downtown for generations of mill shifts, school kids, and Saturday shoppers. Look down at the doorway and the name is still set in tile.

📷 Photo: Wikimedia Commons (CC0)

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Pennsylvania Avenue in 1945. The east end of town grew up around General Refractories, which built clusters of company housing for its workers, more than 40 houses east of Greene Street. Between the three brick plants, whole neighborhoods of Mount Union were company-built.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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For weeks we have been sharing photographs from Charles H. Welch's 1909 history of Mount Union. Now we want to tell you about the photographer who took most of them: R. F. Ernst.

Ernst was born in Goslar, Germany, on New Year's Day 1877. He came to America at eighteen and settled in Houtzdale, Pennsylvania, where he worked in photography with a cousin. After a few years, he returned to Germany and spent three years there. He came back to the United States, settled in Clearfield, and married Jennie Reed in 1902. The couple had a son, Frederick.

In November 1904, Ernst moved his family to Mount Union. Here he was kept busy supplying the town's demand for his photographic work. By the time Welch's history book was published in 1909, Ernst had already made his mark on the town through his images. The book itself credits him: the pictures "have mostly been taken by R. F. Ernst, the Mount Union photographer."

This street view of the Maxwell Hardware corner is one of his photographs. For a century these images have shaped how we understand the town. Every photograph has a photographer. This one gets his name back.

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Shirley Street in the 1920s, the world's silica brick capital in full stride. Three refractories plants running, and a main street to match.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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Shirley Street in the 1930s. Even through the Depression, the brick plants kept Mount Union's main street busier than most towns its size.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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Shirley Street in the 1960s, parking meters, neon, and the last full decade of the brick era. That's 30 days of Mount Union history, one photo at a time. Thank you for following along!

The archive doesn't end here: if you have old photos of Mount Union in a shoebox or an album, share them with the page, with your permission we'll post them with their story so they're never lost.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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Hard to picture in June, but this is what winter looked like in Mount Union. When the Juniata froze hard, the river became the town's gathering place.

Did you ever skate the river? Tell us where.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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Selea Cutshall lost both legs to a serious railroad accident. But he built a life anyway. Born in Springfield Township on February 6, 1870, he came to Mount Union in October 1905 and opened a small store in the eastern section of town. He worked as a confectioner and cobbler. By 1909, when the town's history was written, Cutshall was described as getting around remarkably well and ambitious toward making an honest living. The railroad that built this town took plenty from its people. Yet Selea Cutshall took what remained and built something of his own.

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1910: the J. D. Flood Company delivers furniture the old way, horse, wagon, and muscle. The town was mid-boom, growing faster than any decade before or since.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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March 17, 1936. The St. Patrick's Day Flood put Mount Union's low streets under water, the most destructive flood ever recorded in the Juniata Valley. It hit so hard, across so many towns, that Congress passed the Flood Control Act that same year.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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Strickler's in the 1950s was where two needs met on the same corner: ice cream and a full tank of gas. The Ice Cream sign is painted large above the store. The pumps stand out front, numbered and ready. A truck waits at the curb. Everything in the photograph speaks of a simple afternoon transaction in a working town.

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The Acme grocery on Shirley Street, back when clerks fetched your order from behind the counter and most families ran a tab between brickyard paydays.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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Mount Union, in numbers: 812 people in 1880. About 1,100 by 1900. More than triple that by 1910.

The brick industry came first. The wages followed. And with the wages came the makeshift and disreputable services and entertainments that followed the money. The town earned a nickname for it: a second Sodom and Gomorrah, a reputation that marked the decade when Mount Union built itself and lived rough.

Did your grandparents come during the boom? Tell us who they were, what work they did, and what you remember about those years.

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The factory where the women worked. In 1920, Mount Union Manufacturing opened for men's suits and coats. Within two years, 62 women worked there. The L. Greif Company of Baltimore bought the firm in 1922 and kept building. Employment reached 314 by 1938. In the 1940s, during World War II, part of production shifted to army uniforms, and the company doubled the factory size. By 1948, it had 591 employees.

And then something quiet happened: the sewing factory outgrew the brick industry that named the town. By 1959, seven hundred twenty-five workers. That was about a hundred more than both refractories combined.

Employment was almost exclusively women at first. Then men came as the brick plants closed in the early 1950s. But the needle work stayed steady, right through 1971, when Greif became part of Genesco. Three years later, both plants shut down.

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The Mount Union Times, printers and publishers. The town's own paper chronicled the boom, the floods, the wrecks, and a century of everyday life. Local news has deep roots here.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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On August 20, 1905, the electric lights came on for the first time. Scott Dibert, president of the Mount Union Silica Brick Company, had brought electric light to the town through the Mount Union Light and Power Company. The two large dynamos sat in the engine room of the brick works itself, furnishing both day and night current to the streets.

It was a night long to be remembered. The electric lights glowed for the first time on Mount Union's streets. One man, one brick plant, two industries: the same works that burned to make fire brick across America also powered the lamps where families walked at night.

Did your family live here when those lights came on, or do you have stories passed down about the night Mount Union lit up?

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In the early years at Kistler, the company painted interior walls in bright, deep shades of green, blue, brown, and grey. The residents who lived in those houses complained. When they did, the company provided a lighter palette of beiges and pastels instead.

A small story, but entirely human. The company held the power to choose the colors, but the people who lived inside the houses had a voice. They spoke up. The company responded.

It may be one of the gentlest labor stories in Kistler's history: no strike, no great protest, just residents who asked for something different and a company that listened. The walls changed color.

If you lived in a Kistler house, what color were your walls? We would like to hear.

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The PRR station in 1908, when the Middle Division main line was Mount Union's front door, dozens of trains a day between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. The railroad is the reason the brick companies chose this town.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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Seven Double Mountain Houses were built in 1917 for workers in Kistler, the company town of Mount Union Refractories across the Juniata River from Mount Union. Only three of the seven were still standing when the federal surveyors counted in 1991. Each duplex stands one and one-half stories tall, distinguished by a rectangular plan, gable roof with pent eaves, a wide shed roof dormer on the front, and double front entrance porches. The Double Mountain House was one of six house types designed for the industrial village by the New York architectural firm Mann and MacNeill under landscape architect John Nolen's town plan. Among all the house types built for Kistler, this one faced the steepest loss.

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Saturday night, 1941: the Shapiro Theatre. The Shapiro family opened their first movie house in 1915, the same year the powder plant opened and boom money started moving through town. For decades, this marquee was Mount Union's night out.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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The beehive ovens of the Mount Union Refractories Company. Two former Harbison-Walker managers struck out on their own in 1911 and built this plant on the edge of town, eight kilns to start, twenty-one more added during World War I. That's how much the world wanted Mount Union brick.

📷 Photo: Library of Congress / HABS-HAER

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February 27, 1917, the deadliest day in Mount Union's history. A coal freight collided with the sleeper car of the Mercantile Express; about twenty people died, including seven members of one family. Relief crews raced down from the Altoona shops, and photographs of the wreck were sold as postcards across the state.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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The crew posed out front of the drug store. In a brickyard town, the soda counter was where the day's news got traded after the shift whistle.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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The old Mount Union High School. Generations of Trojans passed through these doors before consolidation.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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The Pennsylvania Railroad tie yard in the 1950s. Mount Union wasn't just brick, millions of wooden crossties passed through the PRR's treating operation here on their way to the main line.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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1945: with the men overseas, the women of Mount Union kept the brick moving. Silica brick from this plant lined the furnaces of the steel mills that armed America in World War II.

If you recognize a face in this photo, tell us her name, let's get them remembered.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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After teaching school for five years in Franklin and Huntingdon counties, Thomas H. Adams was ready to enter business. His savings were modest but sufficient: by April 1861, he had opened a mercantile partnership with Peter M. Bare in Mount Union. A storekeeper first, Adams proved a judicious businessman. He returned to Mount Union in July 1867 to settle permanently. By 1873, he founded something larger: "The Central Banking Co., was organized on March 13, 1873, with T. H. Adams as President and Edmund S. Doty as Cashier."

Adams was born near Orbisonia on February 16, 1836, the son of Irish immigrants. His father John had been born in Ireland and came to America in 1825, eventually settling in Germany Valley. Thomas H.'s journey was the classic one: farm boy, scholar, teacher, tradesman, then founder. By the time the 1909 history was published, the Central Banking Company had weathered the panics of 1873 and 1893 and the slump of 1907. This building was the bank's second home, erected in 1902 and occupied in March 1903.

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Welcome to Historic Mount Union! Every day this month we will share one photograph from the town's past, with the story behind it.

We start from the air: Bricktown USA before 1960. At its peak Mount Union was the largest producer of refractory silica brick in the world, three plants running at once: Harbison-Walker, General Refractories, and North American Refractories. The brick era ran from 1899 to about 1972.

Follow the page so you don't miss a day, and tag a friend who grew up here.

📷 Photo: huntingdoncountyhistory.com

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In 1989 and 1991, federal historians came to town to record the people who remembered the brickyards. They recorded Fred S. Beatty, Josh Booker, Marge Cassatt, Mike Dimoff, Sylvia Hoenstine, and Carl Peduzzi here in Mount Union in 1989. They returned in 1991 to speak with John Curry, Ivan Phillips, and Robert Wagner, among others. These were the people who saw the plants run, who handled the bricks, who lived in the company houses, who watched an entire era rise and fall. The photo shows the corner where one of them, Carl Peduzzi, kept the lunch counter. The government sent historians to listen, and these families answered.

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The machines that built the secret.

In 1942, when Robert Wagner came to work at Harbison-Walker's Mount Union plant, hand molding accounted for 90 percent of production. The company had patented special impact presses made right here that transformed the work. These machines produced denser brick that could better withstand the extreme temperatures inside coke ovens. By the late 1970s, about 95 percent of the coke oven brick shapes leaving Mount Union were made by machine.

The presses were a competitive advantage worth protecting. When the plant closed in 1985, former customers needed replacement brick for coke ovens still in use. The plant's retired manager, with three of his former workers, shipped the molds to a plant in Utah where replacements could be made. The remaining presses were destroyed, and the company regarded the press design as a valuable industrial secret.

The photo shows the molding room bucket line feeding materials into the machines that built an industry.

If your grandfather or great grandfather worked at the brick plant, there's a chance he ran one of those presses or watched them transform the work.

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Who named Mount Union, and when? The town's own histories can't quite agree.

Welch's 1909 book says Col. William Pollock gave the name, in consequence of the union of mountains at this point. A footnote adds that good authority also claims John Dougherty named it.

The founding date is no tidier. Lytle's 1876 county history says Mount Union was laid out in 1850 by Gen. George W. Speer and John Dougherty. The 1937 sesquicentennial book says William Pollock laid it out in 1840 for John Sharrer. Our September 1 post already gave you 1840 and 1849 from two other records. Now you have 1850 as well.

On one point the old books stand together: the name means exactly what it says. Lytle names the mountains in the union: Jack's and Stone mountains on the west, Chestnut ridge and Jack's mountain on the east.

And one number worth a smile: the county's 1937 history records that the first postmaster earned $6.59 for a full year's service.

If your family holds deeds, letters or records from when Mount Union was laid out, we would love to see them.

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