Bricktown Is Some Place, 1918

In a letter dated May 31, 1918, James S. Brattan, once assistant editor of the Fulton County News and by then managing editor of the Mount Union News, wrote back to his old paper about his new town. Fulton County people, he noted, were no uncommon sight in Mount Union.

"This 'Bricktown' is some place," he wrote. Unskilled labor, he wrote, earned at least three dollars a day. He paid three dollars a week for his room and was glad to get it, and table board ran at least seven dollars a week. Salaries and wages, he said, walked arm in arm, and a man paid what was asked and passed it on to the next fellow.

Mount Union, he went on, was no longer a "thick place" in the road but a town fast approaching the population of all of Fulton County. The payrolls of its industries, he said, footed up to enormous totals, and deposits in one bank passed the million mark. Uniformed police were needed at the powder works and the refractories plants, as at any big plant doing government work in wartime, yet he found little rowdyism in town and gave a "dry" county much of the credit for its good order.

He closed with advice for working men back home who were thinking of moving. A man without dependents might succeed, he wrote, and so might a family in which nearly everyone could take a job. "But a father with six little mouths gaping like a nest of young robins had better think twice before making the change."

Checked 2026-10-31 · County histories and primary sources, read in full

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