Mount Union's Powder Plant

Did you know? Mount Union was a First World War boomtown. In 1915 the Etna Explosives Company opened a powder plant just across the river from the town.

The plant ran twenty four hour shifts until it closed at the end of 1918, after the armistice. The Historic American Buildings Survey says it employed at least 1,000 men and women, and that the brickyards and the powder plant together employed around 3,000. The National Register nomination for the town's historic district says the plant employed hundreds of workers in round the clock shifts.

The survey says the munitions jobs paid well but were dangerous and short term. They drew mostly single men from a wide radius around Mount Union, and the company built a few single family houses for its managers and several two and three story barracks style buildings for the rest of its employees.

Before the war, the nomination says, Mount Union's population had been relatively homogeneous. The influx of thousands of new workers drawn and recruited to the Etna plant changed the ethnic and racial face of the town, bringing eastern and southern Europeans and African Americans.

Within a decade, the nomination says, certain areas of the town had earned a regional reputation for "racketeering," as the local writer James T. McElroy described things in 1930. The survey calls it a local reputation and gives the phrase as "a racketeering borough ... a second Sodom and Gomorrah."

Checked 2026-10-30 · County histories and primary sources, read in full

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