Mount Union borough

The Rival Works: First Brick, November 1901

Scott Dibert of Johnstown came to Mount Union with W. H. Haws to look the town over as a brick site, and they found large quantities of ganister rock on Jacks Mountain. The W. H. Haws Fire Brick Company followed. A federal survey of the town says that when the plant was sold to Harbison-Walker, several of the Haws partners were unhappy with the terms and financed a rival plant. A 1991 National Park Service inventory of the county's industrial sites calls it a disputed sale and names Dibert, Haws's former partner, as the founder of the rival Mount Union Silica Brick Company in 1901.

The company made its first brick on November 27, 1901, when the plant was small and its output was about 14,000 brick a day. Charles Howard Welch's history of the town, printed in 1909 and 1910, gives Dibert as president, counts 18 kilns at the works and says the daily capacity “will shortly be 80,000 during this year.” That was a projected capacity, not a count of brick made.

In November 1915 the Harrisburg Telegraph reported that the works, “employing several hundred men,” had been sold to the General Refractories Company of America, under the headline “Million Dollar Brick Plant at Mt. Union Sold to Company.”

The sources differ on the end. The federal survey says General Refractories sold the houses it owned on Pennsylvania Avenue and Water and Shirley streets and closed its brickyard in the early 1950s, and that the plant site became town property and was cleared into a park and athletic field, with part of it used in the 1980s for senior citizen housing and a medical center. The 1991 inventory says the company's Mount Union plant shut down by the end of the 1950s and that the site was cleared in 1956 for a federal housing project.

Checked against the record. Checked against Welch's history of the town, reading the page images for every date and figure, and against the federal survey of the town, the 1991 National Park Service inventory of the county's industrial sites and the Harrisburg Telegraph of November 23, 1915. Welch's book is dated 1909 to 1910, so his figures are attributed to the book and not to a single year. He also says four new kilns had just been completed, without saying whether they are among the 18, so no total is given. We left out Welch's claim about the company's standing among silica brick makers, because we have not counted the others. "Several hundred men" is the only workforce figure we found for this works, and it is not a count. The million dollars is the newspaper's headline; we have not seen a record of the sale. The federal survey's summary dates the closing to about 1950, and the sources still differ on when the plant closed and what the site was cleared for. We searched the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive and found no report of the closing or the clearing, so both accounts stand until a local record from the 1950s turns up.

Sources

Checked 2026-11-01 · Primary sources and the Pennsylvania Newspaper Archive

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