Mount Union borough

The Factory that Outgrew the Brick

The factory where the women worked, and the reason they were the ones working there.

Mount Union Manufacturing opened on Pine Street in 1920 to make men's suits and coats, in a building that then took up a lot of only 120 feet by 40. By 1922 it employed sixty-two women. That same year the L. Greif Company of Baltimore bought the firm and put up an addition 130 feet by 120, running east to the corner of Division Street. By 1928 there were 174 on the books, 314 by 1938, and after the company doubled the size of the plant in the 1940s, with part of the work turned over to army uniforms, 591 by 1948.

The federal survey of the county's industrial sites is blunt about why the workforce was female, and it is the opposite of the way this is usually told. Three refractory plants and the East Broad Top yards were taking the town's men. That, the survey says, gave the sewing factory a large pool of women to draw from.

Then something quiet happened. In the 1950s General Refractories closed and the other two plants began shedding men, and men started coming to the textile factory. By 1959 the sewing factory employed 725 workers, about a hundred more than the two remaining refractories put together. The factory that nobody named the town after had outgrown the one that did.

In 1971 Greif became a division of Genesco, which built a modern plant in a new industrial park east of town and kept 225 workers in the old building making small parts for coats that were assembled in the new one. It did not last. Genesco closed both plants in 1974.

The building did not go empty. From 1978 it housed Dallco Industries of York, making women's garments, and when the surveyors came through it was expanding into a long vacant shoe factory on Division Street. Two storeys, 450 feet by 120, concrete block, with three saw-tooth roof monitors, and they judged it well maintained.

Nothing further from the county histories. The six histories held here end in 1913 and this story belongs to 1971, so there is no passage in them that bears on it. Rather than attach an unrelated page and let it look like corroboration, this story stands on the sources listed below.

Checked against the record. EVERY NUMBER ON THIS PAGE NOW HAS A SOURCE, AND IT IS ONE DOCUMENT. The page carried six employment figures and a chain of ownership with nothing behind any of it. All of it is in Nancy S. Shedd's inventory of the county's historic engineering and industrial sites, prepared for the National Park Service in 1991, on pages 161 and 162: sixty-two women in 1922, the Greif purchase that same year, 314 in 1938, 591 by 1948, 725 by 1959 and “about 100 more than the combined work force of the two refractories”, Genesco in 1971 and the closure of both plants in 1974. The page's figures were accurate. They simply could not be checked by a reader, and now they can. ADDED from the same entry: 174 employees by 1928, which the page skipped, and the dimensions, which make the growth concrete. The plant started on a lot 120 feet by 40 and the surveyed building is 450 by 120. ADDED, and it is the better half of the story: the survey's own explanation of why the workforce was almost entirely female. Three refractory plants and the East Broad Top yards employed a large workforce of men, which “gave the company a large pool of females from which to draw its workers.” The page had the fact and not the cause, which left it looking like a coincidence. ADDED: what happened to the building. Dallco Industries of York has made women's garments there since 1978 and was expanding when the survey was written. A page that ends in 1974 reads as though the place were derelict. ONE DISCREPANCY INSIDE THE SOURCE, noted and not hidden. The survey's header gives a construction date of 1919 while its own history says the factory opened in 1920. Those are not necessarily in conflict, and the page says opened in 1920, which is what the narrative states.

Sources