Mount Union borough

The Factory that Outgrew the Brick

The factory where the women worked. In 1920, Mount Union Manufacturing opened for men's suits and coats. Within two years, 62 women worked there. The L. Greif Company of Baltimore bought the firm in 1922 and kept building. Employment reached 314 by 1938. In the 1940s, during World War II, part of production shifted to army uniforms, and the company doubled the factory size. By 1948, it had 591 employees.

And then something quiet happened: the sewing factory outgrew the brick industry that named the town. By 1959, seven hundred twenty-five workers. That was about a hundred more than both refractories combined.

Employment was almost exclusively women at first. Then men came as the brick plants closed in the early 1950s. But the needle work stayed steady, right through 1971, when Greif became part of Genesco. Three years later, both plants shut down.

Nothing further from the county histories. The six histories held here end in 1913 and this story belongs to 1971, 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 has no source list of its own either, which is said plainly below rather than papered over.

Sources

No source list was recorded with this item when it was written. It is shown here as written and has not been re-verified. Treat it as unverified until it has been.

Checked 2026-09-19 · Historic Mount Union collection

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