Mount Union borough

The Shapiro Theatre, 1941

Photograph not reproduced here. The image that goes with this story is held by huntingdoncountyhistory.com and its credit does not permit republication, so it is cited rather than copied. See the original.

Saturday night, 1941: the Shapiro Theatre. For decades this marquee was Mount Union's night out.

The Shapiros were not newcomers when they built it. George Shapiro already had his own entry among the town's businessmen in Charles H. Welch's history of Mount Union, published in 1909. The family were still at it a generation later: Shapiro and Sherr opened a branch of their Mount Union store at Mapleton in 1924, and Joe Shapiro sat on the committee that ran the county's sesquicentennial in 1937.

The town they sold to was a boom town. A little more than a mile below Mount Union the Aetna Explosives Company had its powder works, and in November 1916 a single order was reported as meaning work for 1,500 men. That spring the town's William Penn Highway boosters had argued for a bridge over the Juniata for a plain reason: with one, the men could walk to the powder plant from their own homes.

Checked against the record. TWO DATES CUT, both unsourced, and the same year in both. The original said "The Shapiro family opened their first movie house in 1915, the same year the powder plant opened." Two searches of the Pennsylvania newspaper archive and a search of the nine books in the local corpus produced no source for either. Neither is contradicted. Both are simply not shown, and a year that carries the whole sentence has to be sourced or dropped. On the powder plant the record does set a bound, and it does not help 1915: the earliest evidence found for the Aetna Explosives works at Mount Union is March 1916, and it is already operating then with hundreds of men. That is consistent with a 1915 opening and equally consistent with 1914 or 1916. It cannot settle the year, so the page no longer names one. REPLACED with what the record does carry, which is a longer story than the one that was there. George Shapiro has his own profile among the businessmen in Welch's 1909 history, so the family were established merchants in Mount Union at least six years before the date the page was hanging everything on. The Mapleton centennial history records Shapiro and Sherr opening a Mapleton branch of their Mount Union store in 1924, and a Joe Shapiro appears on the 1937 county sesquicentennial committee. The powder works detail is from the Harrisburg Telegraph of 25 March 1916, reporting the town's William Penn Highway boosters: they wanted a bridge over the Juniata so the men could walk to the Aetna works, "a little more than a mile below the town", from their homes. The 1,500 figure is from the same paper of 21 November 1916, reporting an order that would put that many men to work, with R. O. Carter as superintendent. Both are attributed to the paper rather than stated flatly, because a reported employment forecast is a forecast. Still open: when did the Shapiro movie house actually open, and when did the Aetna works start? A Mount Union Times run would probably settle both, and this county's own papers are not in either archive searched here.

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