Mount Union borough

The Kistler Company Store, Taken Down in 1990

View of Kistler Company Store and School Building Looking North. Demolished in 1990. - Town of KistlerLibrary of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record. No known copyright restrictions. pa2824.photos.038904p

Kistler was about as complete a company town as this region produced. The company built and kept up virtually every building in it, along with the roads, the water and the electric.

This was the store and school building, and there is a reason the school was in it. By 1924 Wayne Township was running the Kistler school out of three rented rooms on the second floor, above the company store, and the school board proposed to put up a building of its own. The company president, R. P. M. Davis, objected. The board's choice was a “portable, ready-made building,” and he did not think it “adequate or appropriate” for a town designed by famous architects and planted with thousands of dollars of trees and shrubs. Kistler as a model town, he wrote, was famous, and letters came from all over the United States and from Europe asking about its plans and its history. To put “a squatty, ready-made, ugly school building right in the center of Kistler would be a great misfortune.”

So he stopped it. He had Kistler incorporated as a borough, which took its school administration out of the township's hands, and the classes stayed upstairs in the company's building. The borough of Kistler exists because a brick company did not want a cheap schoolhouse spoiling the view.

Children were taught there until 1936, when a brick school went up at the end of Cedar Street with help from the Works Progress Administration. It is still the Kistler elementary school.

The federal photographer got to the store in time, because the caption on this negative carries four words that end the story: demolished in 1990. A ranch house stands on the site.

Nothing further from the county histories. The six histories held here end in 1913 and this story belongs to 1990, 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. ADDED, and it is the best documented thing on the page: the borough of Kistler was incorporated to keep a school out. The survey sets out the sequence and quotes the company president directly. By 1924 Wayne Township was renting three rooms above the company store for the school. The board wanted a portable, ready-made building of its own. R. P. M. Davis, then president, objected that it was neither adequate nor appropriate for a town of this reputation, and wrote that a “squatty, ready-made, ugly school building right in the center of Kistler would be a great misfortune.” To block it he had Kistler incorporated as a borough, separating its school administration from the township, and classes continued in the company's building. The survey cites the Mt. Union Times of 4 September 1924, under the headline “Kistler Will Become A Borough”. A COMPANY NAME HANDLED CAREFULLY. The survey calls him U. S. Refractories' president at this point, not Mount Union Refractories'. That is not a contradiction: the same company took the new name in 1922 after opening a plant in Clearfield County, two years before the school fight. The page says “the company president” rather than picking one of the two names and getting the year wrong. CONFIRMED and unchanged: the store and school were one building, sited along the state road across Kistler Green from the community building, and it was demolished in 1990. The survey adds that a ranch house was built on the site. ADDED: the 1936 brick school at the end of Cedar Street, built with Works Progress Administration help, and still the Kistler elementary school when the surveyors were there. NOT USED, because the source will not carry it. The survey reports that the community building held a theatre, a poolroom and a dance hall and burned in 1933 without being replaced, and that one resident remembered visiting it near the end only to register to vote. That is a fine detail but it belongs to the community building, which is a different building from the one in this photograph.

Sources