Mount Union borough

The Houses in Kistler Have Names

Close View of Vermont Farmhouse-Style Home with Original Porch Roof and Siding, No. 43 Poplar Street. - Town of Kistler, Kistler, Mifflin County, PALibrary of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record. No known copyright restrictions. pa2824.photos.038913p

Not numbers. Names. They are written on John Nolen's own plan for the town, and the federal survey copied them down: Double Valley Farm House, Double Mountain House, Double Capri Villa, Georgian Cottage, Vermont Farm House, and Norman Cottage.

The architects picked those old fashioned forms on purpose. They believed the character of a building could shape the character of the people living inside it, and the families coming to Kistler were going to be a mix of native born Americans, immigrants and African Americans who had never been asked to live the way the company had in mind.

The survey is specific about where those families came from. Kistler's foreign born residents, like Mount Union's, included east European immigrants, and the African American families had been recruited from the country around Saluda, South Carolina. On how they were then distributed through this carefully drawn village, the surveyors chose their words with care, and so will we: although no strict segregation was reported in Kistler, most of the African American families lived on Pine Street.

This one is No. 43 Poplar Street, a Vermont Farm House. Twenty seven of them were built and all but one were still standing when the surveyors counted. The caption notes this one still had its original porch roof and its original siding.

Checked against the record. ADDED, from the survey's own text and footnotes: the African American families in Kistler were recruited from the area around Saluda, South Carolina. That is not a general statement about migration. It names the place they were brought from, and it is the kind of detail a family in this town might still be able to match to a grandparent. THE HEDGE IS THE SOURCE'S OWN AND IT IS REPRODUCED EXACTLY. The survey says “although no strict segregation was reported in Kistler, most of the African-American families lived on Pine Street.” It would be easy to write that up as either a segregated town or an unsegregated one. The document supports neither. It reports no formal rule and an actual concentration on one street, and it rests on interviews with residents, Mary Alexander and Ressie Costlow of Kistler, recorded in 1989 and 1991. The page now carries the same hedge the surveyors used. CONFIRMED, unchanged: the six house names come off Nolen's plan key, and the survey lists three double house designs and three one and a half storey single family designs. The Vermont Farm House is one of the single family three, which is consistent with the twenty seven figure on this page. SPELLING corrected across the Kistler pages: Mann and MacNeille.

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