Mount Union borough

Company Housing (HABS View 2)

Company town survey, view 2Library of Congress HABS PA-2822 l13

The federal survey team walked Mount Union as a company town, where the housing was owned by the factory, the streets were laid out by the factory and the day ran on the factory whistle.

How many company houses were there? The documented figures are worth more than a round number. General Refractories alone owned forty-one houses in Mount Union, scattered across four places: two rows of gambrel-roofed houses on east Water Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, a row of seven up against the plant on Wausau Place, six frame houses on Shirley Street, and twelve one-storey shanties across Hill Valley Run in the section the town called Shantytown.

Across the river, and across the county line into Mifflin, Kistler was built on a different principle entirely. The Sanborn Map Company counted 111 residences there in 1919, laid out to a plan by John Nolen: eighty single family houses, twenty one double houses, and ten buildings holding four families each.

Checked against the record. THE SAME NUMBER, CORRECTED ON THE SAME DAY ON EVERY PAGE THAT CARRIES IT. This page said ninety four company dwellings at Kistler, finished in 1917. So did the page about the design of the village. Neither figure could be traced to a document, and the survey gives the Sanborn Map Company's count of 1919: 111 residences, eighty single family, twenty one double, and ten four family buildings that were not on Nolen's plan and were pulled down in the 1930s. A correction that reaches the page you happen to be reading is not a correction. This project has already had one figure fixed on one page and left standing on another for twenty one checks, so both Kistler counts were changed together and the checking script now greps every story file for the old number. UNCHANGED, because it is documented: the General Refractories figures in the first paragraph, which come from the Mount Union survey and are given place by place rather than as a total.

Sources

Checked 2026-09-09 · Historic Mount Union collection

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