Mount Union borough

Kistler, the Village that Was Designed

Overall View of Kistler and Juniata River from State Highway Bridge Looking South. - Town of Kistler, Kistler, Mifflin County, PALibrary of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record. No known copyright restrictions. pa2824.photos.038900p

Most company towns were laid out by engineers with almost no thought given to how they would feel to live in. Kistler was different, and it is worth being exact about who wanted it different and why.

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 MacNeille drew the buildings. The Sanborn Map Company counted 111 residences in Kistler in 1919: ten built to hold four families each, twenty one double houses and eighty single family houses, in six designs with names instead of numbers.

Nolen wrote the village up himself ten years later in a book called New Towns for Old, and he was plain about the purpose. His philosophy, he said, rested on the belief “that housing is something more than an incident in the life of the worker,” and that good planning could “cultivate a spirit of citizenship and social life among the inhabitants.” Then he explained why that mattered here in particular:

“The population being so largely foreign in its make-up, there is distinct necessity for a lead to be given in the direction of Americanism. This is done in a much better way than by exhortation, by the provision of something tangible, in the form of good living conditions, which more nearly express the ideals of this country.”

The houses had indoor plumbing and bathrooms, and a floor plan with a living room and a separate dining room, which was a middle class arrangement rather than a company house one. The federal surveyors who measured them added the detail that settles the tone of the whole thing: the houses were often so small that the room marked dining room would not take a dining table.

Checked against the record. A NUMBER REPLACED, AND THE SITE'S OWN PAGES ARE WHAT CAUGHT IT. The page said the town was finished in 1917 with ninety four dwellings, seventeen of them two family houses and seventy seven single family houses. That count could not be traced to any document. The survey gives the Sanborn Map Company's count of 1919: 111 residences, ten of them four family buildings, twenty one double houses and eighty single family houses. The eighty is confirmed by arithmetic on this site's other Kistler pages, which were each taken from a separate survey report. Twenty seven Vermont Farm Houses and twenty three Norman Cottages are two of the three single family designs. The third, the Georgian Cottage, makes up the balance to eighty. The seventy seven could not be made to work with any of them. WHERE THE MISSING TEN WENT. The four family buildings were never on Nolen's plan at all. They were put up at the southern end of the village, set apart from the rest, and torn down in the 1930s. Ranch and split level houses stand on Beaver Road where they were. A count taken after that demolition would not include them, which is the likeliest history of the lower figure. WHAT THE PAGE WAS LEAVING OUT, which is the substance of this check. The page praised the village and stopped there. Nolen's own chapter says what the good houses were for, and the survey quotes him: the population being largely foreign, there was a distinct necessity for a lead in the direction of Americanism, better given by good living conditions than by exhortation. A page about this town that prints the compliment and not the purpose is telling half of it. Both halves are now on the page, in his words rather than a paraphrase of them. THE DINING ROOM DETAIL is the surveyors' own, not an inference: the scale of many of the houses was “sometimes so small” that the space designated as the dining room was not large enough for a dining table. SPELLING: the architects were Mann and MacNeille. The survey spells it that way on its title page and in the measured drawings. The page had MacNeill.

Sources

Checked 2026-09-09 · Historic Mount Union collection

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