Mount Union Went Over The Top

On a September night in 1917, about 3,000 marchers paraded through Mount Union in honor of twenty young men leaving for Camp Lee, Virginia. Afterward about 1,200 people crowded into the Shapiro Theater for patriotic addresses, and the house, filled with men of all nationalities, stood and pledged loyalty to the United States. The speeches were given in four languages, which the Harrisburg Telegraph listed as English, Russian, Austrian and Italian, because men of those nationalities were among the first twenty to go. The Red Cross gave each soldier a comfort kit, and the town's organizations gave each one a Testament.

That December the town set out to sign every man, woman and child into the Red Cross. Canvassers went over the whole town twice so that no one was missed, and chairman L. N. Crum announced 98 per cent enrolled and the other 2 per cent pledged, ready to report that Mount Union's Red Cross was "entirely Red." William G. Hardy, a brick setter at the Mount Union Refractories Company, hung a Red Cross flag with twelve crosses in his window. He had ten children, and the whole family belonged. A Y.M.C.A. drive reported that same month had drawn more than 2,000 subscribers.

The money followed. In the Third Liberty Loan of spring 1918, Mount Union raised $535,000, three times its quota, from 4,000 subscribers, and it already counted 100 per cent Red Cross membership. That October it doubled its quota for the Fourth Liberty Loan, which the Telegraph said made it the first town in Huntingdon County to do so, and it went to work pulling the other towns in line.

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

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