Silk For Airplanes

Did you know? A 1991 county inventory of historic engineering and industrial sites says that in 1917 the Susquehanna Silk Mill Company, headquartered in New York City, purchased three tracts of land in Huntingdon along the Pennsylvania Railroad, extending from Twelfth to Fourteenth streets. There it built a large brick building for the manufacture of silk thread, which the inventory describes as two stories high, 840 feet long and 65 feet wide.

The 1937 sesquicentennial book puts the purchase about 1912 and says that during the great war silk fabrics were produced at the plant in great quantities for use in airplanes. In 1920, the inventory says, the plant was sold to the Huntingdon Specialty Company, which continued in the same line of manufacturing until 1940, when the complex was sold to the Huntingdon Throwing Company.

Three years later the Defense Plant Corporation, a federal agency created to buy industrial facilities useful in the war effort, acquired the plant, and Owens-Corning Fiberglas was installed there as a tenant in 1943. The company was drawn to the site in part by the presence of a work force experienced in textile manufacture. It produced insulating board for planes and ships, and yarn for aircraft wing liners and parachutes, as well as products for domestic and industrial use. Employment during World War II ranged between 900 and 1,175, and after the war Owens-Corning Fiberglas bought the plant.

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

← All stories from Huntingdon borough

Have something to add to this story, or a photograph of it? Send it here →