Pittsburgh Plate Glass Ford City Works
Ford City, Armstrong County, Pennsylvania
Marker Inscription
Among the largest and most productive plate glass factories in the world; opened 1887. At its peak, the plant employed more than 3,500 ethnically diverse workers, who passed through a specially-built tunnel under busy train tracks. Operations ended 1991.
The Story
In 1887, glassmaker John Pitcairn's Pittsburgh Plate Glass company opened a sprawling works along the Allegheny River, and the mill town of Ford City grew up around it. At its height the plant was among the largest and most productive plate-glass factories in the world, drawing more than 3,500 workers from a patchwork of immigrant communities who streamed in each shift through a tunnel dug beneath the busy rail lines. For more than a century its furnaces helped glaze the windows and mirrors of a modernizing America, until operations finally wound down in 1991.
Why it matters
The Ford City works embodies the rise and long fade of America's industrial heartland, where immigrant labor and heavy manufacturing built entire communities around a single plant. It stands as a monument to the glassmaking industry that quite literally reshaped how the nation saw itself.
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