Mooncrest
Carnegie, Allegheny County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Designed and built in 1943 by the federal government as defense worker housing. Mooncrest residents produced armor plate, munitions, and ships at the nearby Dravo Corp. during World War II. Operated by U.S. Air Force after 1945; homes sold to private investors in mid-1950s.
Erected by Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission
The Story
In 1943, with the nation's factories running full-tilt for the war, the federal government threw up planned housing like Mooncrest to shelter the workers who kept the arsenal fed. Its residents crossed the river to the Dravo Corporation, turning out armor plate, munitions, and ships for the fight overseas. After the war the Air Force ran the community briefly before the little homes passed into private hands in the 1950s.
Why it matters
Mooncrest is a surviving fragment of the American home front, where victory was manufactured not only on battlefields but in mill towns and government housing tracts along the nation's rivers.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related events
- · World War II home-front defense production
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Pittsburgh Grease Plant
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 2000
Founded in Pittsburgh by Grant McCargo in 1885, this plant became a major producer of the lubricating grease that kept American industry, railroads, and machinery running. Its most storied contribution came during World War II, when it supplied five million pounds of "Eisenhower grease" deemed vital to the war effort. Absorbed into Standard Oil of New Jersey after 1929, the works kept operating until 1999 — more than a century of quiet but essential industrial labor.
Dravo Corporation Shipyard
Neville Township, PA · est. 1995
On this island in the Ohio River just below Pittsburgh, the Dravo Corporation turned a peacetime engineering firm into one of the arsenal of democracy's most unlikely powerhouses. Its inland shipyard mass-produced Landing Ship Tanks—the ungainly, flat-bottomed LSTs that carried tanks, trucks, and troops straight onto hostile beaches. Using assembly-line techniques Dravo pioneered, this yard and four others hundreds of miles from any ocean built two-thirds of the Navy's entire LST fleet, floating them down the rivers to the sea. More than 16,000 workers here produced 145 of the vessels between 1943 and 1945.
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1946
When British General John Forbes captured the smoldering ruins of French Fort Duquesne in 1758, he renamed the strategic point where three rivers meet in honor of British statesman William Pitt. The little town laid out in 1764 sat at the literal doorway to the trans-Appalachian frontier, and by the time it became a city in 1816 it was already funneling settlers and goods westward. In the century that followed, its furnaces and mills earned it a global reputation as the steel capital of the world.
Pittsburgh Glass Works
Pittsburgh, PA · est. 1997
In 1797, frontier entrepreneurs James O'Hara and Isaac Craig lit the furnaces of Pittsburgh's first glass factory on this site, making bottles and window glass for a growing western settlement far from eastern suppliers. The works ran until the 1880s, an early link in what became a mighty industry. Fueled by cheap coal and river transport, Pittsburgh would grow into the nation's leading glass producer.