Mount Union Wanted The Highway

In October 1915, after Governor Brumbaugh's week long tour of the state, the Harrisburg Telegraph reported plans for a new main highway between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the William Penn Highway, and listed Mount Union among the towns it would touch.

By March 1916 Mount Union had a complaint. The route mapped out for approval ran along the far side of the river, and the town wanted the highway through its center instead. Part of the reason was the powder plant a little more than a mile away across the river, where many Mount Union men worked. Ice had carried away part of their footbridge that winter, and some crossed in boats while others rode around by Newton Hamilton, seven or nine miles depending on the road.

Burgess A. S. Welch, editor of the Mount Union Times, planned to call a meeting of everyone interested, and a dentist, Dr. C. E. Culver, was hustling to bring the highway through town. The boosters' plan was a bridge just below Allenport, with one span from the powder plant side to an island and another from the island to the Mount Union side, where a road through Allenport ran on to the main street. The powder company was understood to be willing to pay a big share of the cost.

That July the governors of the William Penn Highway Association were to hear a committee's report on the claims of Mount Union, which, the Telegraph wrote, demanded "a place in the sun."

In 1927 the Democratic Watchman reported a new highway from Mount Union to McVeytown and Lewistown completed and open to traffic, the last piece built being the road out of Mount Union. By 1936 the same paper described Route 22, the William Penn Highway, following a wild gorge for two miles of the stretch between Mount Union and Mill Creek and passing nearby Mount Union.

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

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