Mount Union borough

Harbison-Walker

The plant that built Bricktown. The W. H. Haws Company of Johnstown began the Mount Union works in 1899 and sold the whole property to Harbison-Walker of Pittsburgh in 1900, and the plant expanded in 1905, drawn here by a main rail line and a mountain of ganister rock right at the back door. Its silica brick lined the steel furnaces of Pittsburgh. The complex joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1990.

Nothing further from the county histories. The six histories held here end in 1913 and this story belongs to 1990, 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.

What the fact check changed. The post as published said Harbison-Walker built the Mount Union works in 1899. It did not. The W. H. Haws Company of Johnstown began the plant that year and sold the property to Harbison-Walker in 1900. Two independent sources agree: the federal engineering survey cited in "The first of its kind in the country" on this site, and Nancy Shedd's 1991 county industrial sites inventory. Corrected 1 September 2026.

Sources

Nancy Shedd, Huntingdon County Historic Engineering and Industrial Sites Inventory (1991), on the founding of the Mount Union works. Cited to confirm the date and the builder; still in copyright, so not quoted at length here.

Checked 2026-07-04 · Historic Mount Union collection

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