Mount Union borough

When the Government Came to Listen

View Showing Peduzzi'S Lunch Counter and Pappy'S Place Looking South at the Corner of Jefferson and Shirley Streets - Town of Mount UnionLibrary of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey / Historic American Engineering Record. No known copyright restrictions. pa2822.photos.038886p

In 1989 and 1991 federal historians came to Mount Union to record the people who remembered the brickyards.

You can see them working in the footnotes. The Historic American Buildings Survey's report on this town cites, in among the newspaper clippings and the company records, a line like this: “Ivan Phillips, interview by author, Mt. Union, Pa., June 11, 1991.” Someone sat down with him and wrote down what he said, and it went into the federal record.

Alongside him the same notes cite Nancy Shedd, the county historian whose 1988 engineering report the whole survey was built on.

That is what a government survey looks like from the inside: not a form, but a historian in a front room in Mount Union with a notebook, on a Tuesday in June 1991.

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 against the record. PARTLY CONFIRMED, and the page now claims only the part that is. CONFIRMED at the Historic American Buildings Survey report on the Town of Mount Union, HABS No. PA-5974: a footnote reads “Ivan Phillips, interview by author, Mt. Union, Pa., June 11, 1991.” That establishes both the interviewing and the 1991 date, in the survey's own citation. NOT FOUND HERE: the other eight names the page listed — Fred S. Beatty, Josh Booker, Marge Cassatt, Mike Dimoff, Sylvia Hoenstine, Carl Peduzzi, John Curry and Robert Wagner. Neither the Mount Union data pages nor the Kistler data pages name them. They very likely come from the fuller documentation or from Kim E. Wallace's Brickyard Towns of 1993, and they are not asserted on the page while the source for them is unopened. Not found is not the same as not real. A NAME TRAP AVOIDED. The Kistler report does contain a Hoenstine — William Ray Hoenstine, a resident who with Superintendent Edgar Kurtz bought the first two company houses in 1944. That is not Sylvia Hoenstine, the interviewee. Same surname in the same small town, thirty years apart, and treating the one as evidence for the other would have been exactly the kind of match that reads as confirmation and is not. ALSO IN THOSE FOOTNOTES, and it corroborates another page here: “Nancy Shedd to author, April 9, 1992”. Shedd is the county historian whose 1988 Historic American Engineering Record report underlies the National Register nomination for the Mount Union Refractories site.

Sources