Mount Union borough

Ganister Hill and the new Americans

Stoianoff Brothers advertisement, Naroden GlasWikimedia Commons (Naroden Glas, 1922, public domain) c05

A 1922 advertisement for the Stoianoff Brothers of Mount Union, printed in Naroden Glas, the Bulgarian-Macedonian newspaper in America.

Ganister Hill is where many of those families lived. The federal survey counts it: in 1911 Harbison-Walker owned 104 houses, all two-storey frame buildings, twenty-seven of them duplexes, and all but three grouped on the sloping hillside around the south and west sides of the plant to form the neighbourhood called Ganister Hill.

Who lived there is on the record too, in the words of the town's own paper. In January 1916 the Twice-A-Week Republican praised the company for an “uplift program” and listed its employees as “Slavish, Roumanians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks and Serbians” as well as “native Americans, and southern Negroes.”

The Red Cross ran an Americanization Program alongside it, teaching sewing, fancy work and cooking. The survey's own judgement is worth quoting: the arrival of so many people whose ways of speaking and living were foreign to longer-settled residents “must have been disturbing, and the response to try to make the newcomers less challenging and more controllable by ‘uplifting’ them into a safe, more respectable social category was common throughout the country.”

Checked against the record. SOURCED from the Historic American Buildings Survey report on the Town of Mount Union, HABS No. PA-5974. The page previously had no source. CONFIRMED and made exact: the page said “the hundred company houses on Ganister Hill”. The survey says Harbison-Walker owned 104 houses in 1911, all two-storey frame, twenty-seven of them duplexes, all but three grouped on the hillside south and west of the plant to form Ganister Hill. A round hundred was close; 104 is what the record says. THE NATIONALITIES CORRECTED to the ones actually recorded. The page listed “Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia, and Russia”. The survey quotes the town's own newspaper of 28 January 1916, the Twice-A-Week Republican, listing the company's employees as “Slavish, Roumanians, Bulgarians, Italians, Greeks and Serbians” as well as “native Americans, and southern Negroes.” Serbians appear in both lists. Croatians and Russians do not appear in the source, and Bulgarians, Roumanians and Italians were missing from the page — which matters here, because this page is built around a Bulgarian-Macedonian newspaper. The period terms are kept as the paper printed them; paraphrasing them into modern words hides what was actually said about these people. NOT SOURCED, and removed: that families boarded “five to ten single countrymen at a time”. Boarding was common and the figure is plausible; nothing opened here gives it. ADDED, because it is the honest half of an “uplift” story: the Red Cross ran an Americanization Program teaching sewing, fancy work and cooking, and the survey itself reads the whole effort as an attempt to make newcomers “less challenging and more controllable”. A page about new Americans that records only the welcome is not describing what happened.

Sources