Historic Mount Union, Pennsylvania

Historic Mount Union, Pennsylvania Interesting facts, photos and trivia about Mount Union, a borough in Huntingdon County. Historic District was listed on National Register in 1994.

Not officially affiliated with municipal government or any historic organization.

The county's own history book, published for the sesquicentennial in 1937, lists the banks then operating in Huntingdon ...
08/31/2026

The county's own history book, published for the sesquicentennial in 1937, lists the banks then operating in Huntingdon County. Two of them were here: the Central National Bank of Mount Union and the First National Bank of Mount Union.

The book makes a point of something that would not have felt small at the time. Every one of the county's banks stayed open and solvent straight through the years from 1929 to 1937, and all of them were on solid ground when it was written.

What do you remember being on that corner?

Photo: Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, Town of Mount Union (HABS PA-5974).

The date is cut into the front of the building: 1936.That same year the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sc...
08/30/2026

The date is cut into the front of the building: 1936.

That same year the Treasury Department's Section of Painting and Sculpture sent an artist to put a mural inside it. He signed it Paul Rohland. What he chose to paint is the part worth keeping. He did not center the picture on a church or a courthouse or a mountain. He put Harbison-Walker's smoking kilns and the rows of Ganister Hill houses dead in the middle of it.

Fifteen years later the company tore every one of those houses down. The painting is still on the wall.

When did you last go in and look at it?

Photo: Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, U.S. Post Office, Mount Union (HABS PA-5989).

When the last of it was over, the town went and got the bricks.A committee collected brick and some of the most elaborat...
08/29/2026

When the last of it was over, the town went and got the bricks.

A committee collected brick and some of the most elaborate shapes from all three Mount Union plants and built a platform for a mailbox on the public sidewalk beside the post office, at Market and South Jefferson. The plaque set into it reads Bricktown Ganister and lists the plants by name. Look closely at the picture and you can pick out the shapes that were never ordinary bricks at all.

The Mount Union Times ran it under a headline that got it right: Mailbox Holder A Tribute To Bricktowners' Heritage.

Have you ever stopped and looked at it?

Photo: Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, U.S. Post Office, Mount Union (HABS PA-5989).

For most of the plant's life the ganister came from the far side of the Juniata and had to be hauled across the river an...
08/28/2026

For most of the plant's life the ganister came from the far side of the Juniata and had to be hauled across the river and across the main line. In the late 1940s Harbison-Walker moved the mining to the mountainside directly above the plant and set the crushing and washing at intervals down the slope, with an overhead conveyor to bring the rock the rest of the way in.

That decision took about a hundred company houses with it. The Ganister Hill neighborhood stood in the way, and the conveyor belt ran between two of the houses. Residents were allowed to buy their own homes for salvage, for around two hundred dollars, and a good deal of that lumber went back up as new houses in the flats along the river. To shelter the families who were displaced, the Huntingdon County housing authority built its first federally supported project on the east edge of town.

Did your family live on Ganister Hill?

Photo: Library of Congress, Historic American Engineering Record, Harbison-Walker Refractories Company (HAER PA-242).

Thousands of people climb the Thousand Steps every year. Far fewer know they were somebody's job.The federal engineering...
08/27/2026

Thousands of people climb the Thousand Steps every year. Far fewer know they were somebody's job.

The federal engineering survey has the answer, and it got it from the man responsible. Frank Pollicino, who worked in the Harbison-Walker quarry in the 1970s, asked John Shaffer, the superintendent of the mine, about the steps cut into the south face of Jacks Mountain. Shaffer said he had his own quarry workers build them, in 1936, to give the men a better way up to their work. The survey adds one more thing worth knowing: it came right after the flood of 1936 destroyed the dinky bridge, and Shaffer may simply have been looking for something to keep his crew working until the damage was repaired and the quarry could run again.

So a flood shut a mountain down, and the men built a staircase up it while they waited.

The stone building in this picture is the engine repair house the company kept up at the quarry.

How many times have you climbed them?

Photo: Library of Congress, Historic American Engineering Record, Harbison-Walker Refractories Company, Engine Repair House (HAER PA-242).

The federal survey recorded this storefront on Shirley Street under the name it carried: T. A. Giacobello Foreign Suppli...
08/26/2026

The federal survey recorded this storefront on Shirley Street under the name it carried: T. A. Giacobello Foreign Supplies Store. That was what a store called itself when it stocked what the newer families in town could not buy anywhere else.

The surveyors took a second photograph from the same spot looking the other way, up the street toward the old entrance to the Harbison-Walker brickyard. That is how close it was. The store sat at one end of the walk and the gate sat at the other.

Does anybody remember the Giacobello store?

Photo: Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, T. A. Giacobello Foreign Supplies Store (HABS PA-5992).

As the wartime labor market kept expanding, and a third brick plant and a government munitions plant went up, Mount Unio...
08/25/2026

As the wartime labor market kept expanding, and a third brick plant and a government munitions plant went up, Mount Union drew a number of African American workers from the South. The federal survey puts it plainly: it gave the town a mix of nationalities and races that was new to central Pennsylvania at the time.

The survey records this building at Chestnut and Division streets as constructed by African American residents in 1921. The history of that community was serious enough to carry a master's thesis of its own at Penn State in 1987, written by R. Cummins McNitt.

Whose people were part of that congregation?

Photo: Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, Mt. Hope Baptist Church (HABS PA-5988).

The demand for steel in the First World War pushed silica brick production to a level the county could not staff. Employ...
08/24/2026

The demand for steel in the First World War pushed silica brick production to a level the county could not staff. Employment at Huntingdon County refractories hit an all time high of 1,800 in 1919, and more than 1,600 of those jobs were in Mount Union alone. Local people could not fill them, so the companies hired eastern and southern European workers, and the town filled up with families who had been somewhere else a year before. By 1910 the Ganister Hill section already held Italian, Austro-Hungarian, Serbian, Croatian, Russian and Macedonian households.

They built this. The federal survey records the church at North Jefferson and Sherman streets as constructed by East European immigrants in 1915 and 1916.

Whose family came to Mount Union for the brickyards?

Photo: Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, Saints Peter and Paul Orthodox Church (HABS PA-5987).

In 1906 the Pennsylvania Railroad replaced its bridge over the Juniata east of Mount Union. The new one runs 668 feet on...
08/23/2026

In 1906 the Pennsylvania Railroad replaced its bridge over the Juniata east of Mount Union. The new one runs 668 feet on six stone arches of a hundred feet each, built of the massive cut stone the railroad used everywhere. It took eight months and twenty days and was finished that December. The four span truss bridge it replaced was handed over to automobiles.

It was part of a much larger straightening and rebuilding program between Ryde, in Mifflin County, and Mount Union. In 1907 the Semi-Weekly News of Huntingdon ran the numbers on all of it under a headline that has aged very well: PRR Spends $3,250,000 to Save 22 Seconds.

Have you ever fished under those arches?

Photo: Library of Congress, Historic American Engineering Record, Pennsylvania Railroad, Mount Union Bridge.

The Pennsylvania Railroad put up a new freight depot in Mount Union in 1914, on Pennsylvania Avenue between Depot and Wa...
08/22/2026

The Pennsylvania Railroad put up a new freight depot in Mount Union in 1914, on Pennsylvania Avenue between Depot and Washington streets. It did not replace the old freight office so much as grow onto it. Sanborn insurance maps from 1919 still show part of the older building attached to the east side, and the line of that old roof could be read on the east wall long after the building itself came off.

When the federal survey team came through, the depot had sat unused for twenty years or more, Conrail had announced plans to tear it down, and a group of townspeople was trying to acquire it for a community library or a senior citizens center.

Does anybody know how that ended? Is the depot still standing?

Photo: Library of Congress, Historic American Buildings Survey, Town of Mount Union (HABS PA-5974).

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Mount Union, PA
17066

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