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Monument
Centre Daily Times November 08 2004
Looking Back | In former company town, history runs deep
By Rich Kerstetter; rkerstet@centredaily.com
"A large rock along Beech Creek gave the town its name, but the rich deposits of clay and coal beneath the earth provided its reason for existence.
Monument, in the far northern reaches of Liberty Township, was a company town, owned -- as historian Jim Davy noted --"lock, stock and barrel" by Harbison-Walker.
The company built and owned the houses, where its employees lived. It owned the general store, where the workers and their families bought nearly everything they needed -- often on credit until the next payday. It owned the freight station, where the supplies brought in by rail were unloaded.
And, of course, it owned the plant where the men of the town made thousands of firebricks, day after working day, from the early years of the 20th century until May 10, 1953, when the factory shut down.
Monument was named for Monument Rock, a large chunk of which was blasted into Beech Creek when the company constructed a dinky, or narrow-gauge railroad line, to the mines.
At its peak, Monument was home to almost 60 families plus a number of single workers who lived in the town boardinghouse or in "shanties," recalled Davy, who grew up there.
Miners, toiling on their hands and knees, extracted clay and coal from the Plane Hill and Twin Run mines -- now long closed down. The raw material was molded and baked in the brickworks that dominated the town. Time -- and the pace of life itself -- was measured by the factory whistle.
Things were pretty much the same just a few miles down the road in Orviston, Curtin Township, where General Refractories owned the brickyard -- and the entire town.
Nevertheless, the towns were fierce rivals, with baseball games between the two often featuring as many fisticuffs as fastballs.
But with the demise of steam locomotives and coal-fired blast furnaces in the steel industry, there was no longer a demand for the firebricks produced in Monument and Orviston.
As the brickyards closed, a way of life ended.
Monument's post office closed in 1966; the elementary school the following year. And the train tracks were removed about two years after that.
Today, state Route 364 literally ends at Orviston."
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