Kistler

History

Kistler, Pennsylvania is one of the United States' lesser known Company Towns. A Company Town is a settlement built and operated by a single business enterprise. Most company towns were established between 1880 and 1930 during the early industrial age. The town was built and owned by the Mount Union Refractories Company (MURC), a large brick making plant originally located at the foot of Mount Union, Pennsylvania. The MURC sought to design and implement an industrial village which provided the best home and surrounding environment for its employees, in the hope that this would achieve the highest possible working efficiency. In order to successfully accomplish this goal, the company appointed distinguished town planner John Nolen to design a model company town. John Nolen was a prominent planner of his time, producing nearly four hundred planning projects, with more than 25 of those company towns. Nolen published New Towns for Old in 1927, which carefully outlines in detail the planning precautions taken in the towns’ design and also includes illustrations of Kistler’s planned layout. Nineteen-eighteen saw the construction of the industrial village. At this stage, MURC employed some seven hundred employees. The town of Kistler was located on the east side of the Juniata River, one and one-half miles east of the Refractories site. MURC acquired a land parcel of approximately sixty acres on the opposite side of the river from the works, in order to reduce the potential spread of dust, dirt and noise. The site of the planned town was triangular in shape, bordered by the Juniata River, the Pennsylvania Railroad Topography and preexisting agricultural land. Although there was no definite axis in John Nolen’s design, the centre point of the plan was said to be…

Geography

Kistler is located at (40.380652, -77.867737). According to the United States Census Bureau, the borough has a total area of , of which is land and (7.14%) is water.

Race & ethnicity