Mount Union borough

The Rarest House in Kistler

View of Double Mountain-Style Houses Looking Southeast on Birch Street. - Town of KistlerLibrary of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record. No known copyright restrictions. pa2824.photos.038911p

Seven Double Mountain Houses were built in 1917 for workers in Kistler, the company town of Mount Union Refractories across the Juniata River from Mount Union. Only three of the seven were still standing when the federal surveyors counted in 1991. Each duplex stands one and one-half stories tall, distinguished by a rectangular plan, gable roof with pent eaves, a wide shed roof dormer on the front, and double front entrance porches. The Double Mountain House was one of six house types designed for the industrial village by the New York architectural firm Mann and MacNeill under landscape architect John Nolen's town plan. Among all the house types built for Kistler, this one faced the steepest loss.

Nothing further from the county histories. The six histories held here end in 1913 and this story belongs to 1991, 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 and confirmed. Published without a source list. Every claim has now been read against the 1991 county industrial survey and holds, including the architectural description and the count of seven built and three surviving. The superlative needed the most work, because saying a thing suffered the worst losses means counting all its rivals: the survey gives all six house types, and the Double Mountain House lost four of seven where the next worst lost two of twenty-three. One thing the original leaves out is worse still - Kistler also had twelve four-family buildings, and not one of them survives. Checked 1 September 2026.

Sources

Nancy Shedd, Huntingdon County Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites Inventory (1991), the Kistler entry: ninety-four company-built dwellings in six house types named on John Nolen's plan, designed by Mann and MacNeill of New York; the Double Mountain House described as a one-and-one-half-story duplex, seven built and three surviving. The survey's counts for all six types are what make the "steepest loss" claim checkable: 6/6, 7/3, 8/8, 30/30, 27/26 and 23/21. Cited to confirm; still in copyright, so not quoted at length here.

Checked 2026-09-23 · Historic Mount Union collection

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