The Last Day, and the Molds that Went to Utah

6. General view looking west from eastern edge of complex. Kilns have been demolished but kiln stacks still stand.Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record. No known copyright restrictions. pa2723.photos.356902p

At the end of November 1985 a Harbison-Walker spokesman told the United Steelworkers that the Mount Union plant was closing, because the silica brick market had all but collapsed. Somewhere between twenty five and forty seven people were still on the payroll. In 1925 there had been 563.

Then came a strange postscript that says everything about what was made here. Mount Union and one General Refractories plant in Claysburg were the only two operations in the entire country that made silica shapes and nothing else, the odd sizes that coke ovens are built out of. When Mount Union shut, customers with coke ovens still running discovered there was nowhere left to buy replacements. So the retired plant manager and three former employees went in, gathered up the molds, and shipped them to a plant in Utah so the brick could still be made. What was left over was sold for scrap in April of 1989.

North American's yard closed in March of 1990. That was the end of it.

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.

Sources

HABS PA-5974 p.7 (Nov 1985 notice, 25 to 47 employed vs 563 in 1925)
HAER PA-242 pp.2-3 (silica shapes, molds shipped to Utah, scrapped April 1989)
LOC caption pa2723.photos.356902p

Checked 2026-09-15 · Historic Mount Union collection

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